Member-only story
Is Amazon any different to the supermarket chains that sell their own brand products?
Reuters reports that the EU is investigate Amazon next year for favoring its own brand products on its online marketplace, which as anybody who has used the platform, is absolutely the case.
The EU could save its taxpayers a lot of money, because there is nothing to investigate here. If Amazon makes something, it will always put its own products front and center. Sadly, we have long since accepted this, in large part because of the positive associations most people have of the platform and because we like paying less.
Furthermore, antitrust legislation cannot punish a company for being successful, for its market share or for being more competitive. What it does punish, and rightly so, are predatory strategies, that is, leveraging dominant positions to make it difficult for other companies to compete with it, which is exactly what we see here: a company that leverages its platform to systematically place its own brand products as the first option. Basically, what happens when you are the manager of a successful platform, and you decide to compete with the brands you also sell.
What is Amazon accused of? Predatory practices such as using proprietary data to replicate successful products on its platform and then underselling them, as well as giving them…
