Amazon Loses EU Antitrust Appeal Over Doubled-Antitrust Probe

Amazon Loses EU Antitrust Appeal Over Doubled-Antitrust Probe

Amazon.com Inc, the giant online retailer that serves more than a billion customers worldwide, has lost its appeal against a move to allow parallel antitrust investigations by the European Commission and the Italian government into how the ecommerce giant may have unfairly treated some sellers on its platform.

The EU Court of Justice, the union’s top Tribunal, dismissed Amazon’s challenge. Amazon cannot appeal the final ruling.

Amazon had vehemently opposed to a European Commission decision allowing Italy to continue running its own probe into the “buy box.” That is precisely where Amazon promotes the sellers of a particular product. Amazon had expressed its objection after the EU’s antitrust arm had started to examine the same issue.

The e-commerce tech-giant last year had settled the EU probe by offering a number of remedies, including a pledge to address concerns about the way its Buy Box for showcasing specific offers and Prime unduly favoured its own retail business, including a promise to display a second Buy Box immediately underneath the first one.

Amazon and its Big Tech peers are battling global antitrust actions involving cloud computing, internet messaging, and smart devices.

Amazon is No. 1 in the 2022 Digital Commerce 360 Top 1000 database. The Top 1000 ranks North American web merchants by sales. It is No. 3 in the Digital Commerce 360 Online Marketplaces Database, which ranks the 100 largest global marketplaces.