California Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon

Mr. Bonta’s complaint quoted emails between a personal care electronics brand and another retailer, asking the retailer to raise prices on a discounted item because Amazon suppressed their listing. The brand wanted “to remove all deals and inventory until Q1 since this has happened several times and is causing a big disruption to the Amazon business,” it wrote. “We simply cannot afford buy-box shutdowns on Amazon anymore.”

The complaint said the seller no was longer supplying products to the competitor.

The California lawsuit comes as the Federal Trade Commission, led by Lina Khan, a critic of Amazon, is investigating whether the company has broken antitrust laws. The agency is also looking into the process through which consumers buy or cancel an Amazon Prime membership, which some say can be deliberately confusing.

Amazon has attacked the F.T.C. several times during the investigations. It said last year that Ms. Khan, who wrote a breakout law review critique of the company’s power, should recuse herself from antitrust inquiries into the company.

Last month, Amazon moved to stop the agency’s requests to interview Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, and its chief executive, Andy Jassy, in the Prime inquiry on the grounds that the requests were “calculated to serve no other purpose than to harass Amazon’s highest-ranking executives and disrupt its business operations.”

Lawmakers in Washington also have Amazon in their sights. The company has aggressively fought a bipartisan antitrust bill that would stop Amazon from favoring its own products in its online store. The proposed law has yet to pass, and its chances may dim further as lawmakers turn their attention to the midterm elections.

The company has been more diplomatic in other cases. Facing an inquiry into its retail practices in Europe, the company proposed a series of changes, including limiting the data it collects from rival sellers and allowing them to sell to Prime customers without using Amazon’s logistics program.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/technology/california-files-antitrust-lawsuit-against-amazon.html