The American competition authority, the FTC, and 17 states filed a complaint on Tuesday against Amazon, which they accuse of “anti-competitive and unfair strategies to illegally maintain its monopoly” on online commerce, according to a press release from the federal agency.
The FTC, also responsible for consumer protection, already has several investigations and complaints underway against the platform on various subjects, from data confidentiality to its commercial practices.
“It is not the size of Amazon that is at issue”, specifies the institution, but the “illegal methods which aim to exclude competitors, to prevent them from developing and to prevent alternatives from emerging”.
According to the FTC, Amazon notably discourages sellers from offering prices lower than its own on products where the Seattle group competes with retailers.
The authority also criticizes the American giant for making merchants’ eligibility for “Prime” (a subscription which allows consumers to have them delivered quickly) conditional on the use of Amazon’s “expensive” logistics services.
“Amazon is exploiting its monopoly power to enrich itself, while driving up prices and degrading service for the tens of millions of American families who shop on its platform and the hundreds of thousands of companies that depend on Amazon” to market their products, asserts the president of the FTC, Lina Khan, quoted in the press release.
“The complaint filed today clearly shows that the FTC has radically departed from its mission to protect consumers and competition,” responded David Zapolsky, a vice president of Amazon, in a statement to the press.
He assures that the practices questioned by the authority have on the contrary “contributed to stimulating competition and innovation throughout the retail sector, and have made it possible to offer greater choice, lower prices lower prices and faster delivery times to Amazon customers, as well as greater opportunities for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store.
“Amazon Antitrust Paradox”
Under the leadership of Joe Biden’s government, the FTC has been trying for years to bring technology giants, regularly accused of abuse of a dominant position, into line.
Relations between the organization and Amazon are particularly tense.
The lawyer Lina Khan, president of the FTC since 2021, made herself known in the academic world when she was still a student, by publishing an article in 2017 entitled Amazon’s antitrust paradox in the Yale University Law Review.
She considered that the American legislative arsenal was insufficient to fight against the monopolistic practices of groups like Amazon.
In June 2021, the company submitted a complaint to the FTC, asking it to ensure that its manager does not handle antitrust matters concerning it, and accusing it of its lack of impartiality.
But that hasn’t stopped the federal agency from moving forward on several fronts.
Last June, the FTC filed a complaint against Amazon for having “trapped consumers” with its Prime subscription, which renews automatically and is “complicated” to cancel.
The institution also attacked the group over respect for data confidentiality. Last May, Amazon agreed to pay more than $30 million to end lawsuits against Ring and Alexa (connected doorbells and speakers, security cameras), two product lines that collect a lot of information about their users.