The Big One. This is how the media define the lawsuit that the American FTC is preparing against Amazon, which has repeatedly ended up in the crosshairs of the commission led by Lina Khan but which now risks being faced with a series of very heavy accusations with an uncertain outcome.
Bloomberg reports that the e-commerce giant will be accused of rewarding merchants who rely on its logistics system, while penalizing those who use external services. The FTC has been working on this case for several months, and is now almost ready to file the charge. Before August, it is said, so as not to be forced to lengthen the time too much.
So once again Lina Khan against Amazon: the young jurist declared war on Big Tech well before she took office at the head of the Commission: just remember her 2017 Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox treaty, in which she develops new tools to assess the damage caused by anti-competitive behavior by large companies. And since becoming president of the FTC, the federal agency has dramatically tightened market controls to ensure it works properly.
The problem, as mentioned, concerns third-party sellers – the so-called Marketplace: each sale corresponds to a commission that merchants pay to Amazon, which also earns by offering them additional services in logistics and advertising. These are non-mandatory “extras” that are nevertheless considered necessary for the seller himself to be taken into account by e-commerce and continue to do business.
The FTC accuses Amazon of disadvantages those who do not use these ancillary services and is studying an algorithm used by the Seattle company that defines the placement of some featured products in the Buy Box through which buyers can buy with a simple click. The doubt for the Commission is that this algorithm considers those who use Amazon services and keeps out those who do not. Similar cases had come under fire from European antitrust just a few years ago: the compromise between the EU and Amazon provided for e-commerce to change its Buy Box practices by limiting the use of third-party retailer data. Lina Khan has already made it clear that such compromises will not be accepted.