The Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) suspects Amazon is using data from third-party sellers to create its own products. A survey of wall street journal published in April 2020 brought this practice to light.
With its marketplace and hundreds of millions of users, Amazon has become an almost obligatory passage for many third-party sellers around the world. But benefiting from the strike force of the American juggernaut has a price and it has often been criticized for its practices aimed at taking advantage of the dependence it generates with its third-party sellers.
New episode in the United States with the American stock market policeman, the SEC (Securities & Exchange Commission), which suspects Amazon of using the data of third-party sellers in order to create its own products, according to the wall street journal. The SEC opened an investigation more than a year ago to determine whether the group founded by Jeff Bezos indeed copied the products of its third-party sellers. As part of its investigations, the SEC entity in charge of enforcing the law notably requested access to the exchanges of several senior Amazon executives.
Anti-competitive practices revealed in 2020
These accusations are not new since an investigation by the wall street journal published in April 2020 had revealed that the company regularly uses individual data from third-party sellers to develop its own products, offered to consumers under the name Amazon Basics. Amazon had denied the accusation.
However, the group, which raked in nearly $470 billion in revenue and more than $33 billion in profits in 2021, had launched an internal investigation, but refused to provide a copy of its report to a US congressional committee investigating the issue. size and power of Amazon and other tech giants. Enough to fuel suspicions about the Seattle octopus…
Investigations multiply in Washington and Brussels
The matter returned to Capitol Hill last month when members of the House of Representatives antitrust subcommittee referred Amazon and most of its top executives to the Justice Department for potentially obstructing their work. “There is no factual basis for this, as demonstrated by the enormous volume of information we have provided over several years of good faith cooperation in this investigation.”an Amazon spokesperson said after the Justice Department referral.
However, the threat is becoming clearer for the giant from across the Atlantic. In its domestic market, Amazon is also the subject of an antitrust investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the US competition policeman, whose president Lina Khan is particularly feared by the Gafam. The pressure is also increasing in Europe, where Brussels opened an in-depth investigation in 2019 into the use by employees of the American group of non-public data from third-party sellers of the marketplace, so as to free themselves from the risks of competition. . So many investigations which, on both sides of the Atlantic, could lead to heavy fines for Amazon.