The UK should not accept Amazon's "commitments" to play nice
Recently our close allies at SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, issued a powerful report laying out how Amazon uses its monopoly power to abuse sellers on its platform, harvesting data and fees and stifling their businesses.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) last year launched an investigation into Amazon’s behaviour, prompting Amazon to respond with a set of commitments to behave better. The commitments are self-serving and full of holes, but in July the CMA issued a note signaling its provisional decision to accept those commitments.
Together with SOMO and the Open Markets Institute, we have sent a submission to the CMA, urging it to reject Amazon’s offer; pursue its investigation into Amazon’s marketplace practices to its conclusion, and seriously consider “structural remedies” (ie forcing Amazon to split off parts of its business” – because this is ultimately a structural problem where Amazon can profitably milk conflicts of interest.
Our submission is here.
