The European Commission decided, on Tuesday 20 December, to make commitments offered by Amazon under the EU’s antitrust rules legally binding.
The commitments offered by Amazon address the Commission’s competition concerns regarding Amazon’ s use of non-public marketplace seller data and over a possible bias in granting to sellers access to its Buy Box and Prime programme.
Between 14 July and 9 September 2022, the Commission submitted Amazon’s first commitments to market participants and consulted all interested third parties to verify whether the proposed commitments would remove the competition concerns identified by the Commission (see EUROPE 12993/2).
In the light of the results of this consultation, Amazon amended its initial proposal and committed to:
- improve the presentation of the second competing Buy Box offer by making it more prominent and to include a review mechanism in case the presentation is not attracting adequate consumer attention;
- increase transparency and early information flows to sellers and carriers about the commitments and their newly acquired rights, enabling, amongst others, early switching of sellers to independent carriers;
- lay out the means for independent carriers to directly contact their Amazon customers, in line with data-protection rules, enabling them to provide equivalent delivery services to those offered by Amazon;
- improve carrier data protection from use by Amazon’s competing logistics services, in particular concerning cargo profile information;
- increase the powers of the monitoring trustee by introducing further notification obligations;
- introduce a centralised complaint mechanism, open to all sellers and carriers in case of suspected non-compliance with the commitments;
- extend the duration of the commitments relating to Prime and the second competing Buy Box offer to seven years from the five initially proposed.
“These commitments cover obligations that will reshape three central pillars of Amazon’s marketplace ecosystem: first, its use of data, second, the conditions of access to the Buy Box and third, the conditions of access to the Prime programme”, said Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President for Competition Policy (https://aeur.eu/f/4qp ).
The Commission found that Amazon’s final commitments will ensure that it will not use marketplace seller data for its own retail operations and that it will grant non-discriminatory access to the Buy Box and Prime programme. The Commission has decided to make them legally binding on Amazon.
The offered commitments cover all Amazon’s current and future marketplaces in the European Economic Area. They exclude Italy for the commitments relating to the Buy Box and Prime in view of the decision of 30 November 2021 of the Italian competition authority imposing remedies on Amazon with regard to the Italian market.
The final commitments will remain in force for 7 years in relation to Prime and the display of the second competing Buy Box offer, and 5 years for the remaining parts of the commitments. Under the supervision of the Commission, an independent trustee will be in charge of monitoring the implementation and compliance with the commitments.
If Amazon were to breach the commitments, the Commission could impose a fine of up to 10% of its total annual turnover, without having to find an infringement of EU antitrust rules or a periodic penalty payment of 5% per day of Amazon’s daily turnover for every day of non-compliance.
For more information: https://aeur.eu/f/4qq ; https://aeur.eu/f/4qr (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)