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Another antitrust lawsuit is being filed in Europe targeting Big Tech for hefty damages over claims of abusive self-preferencing.<\/p>\n
This time ecommerce giant Amazon — and its nudge-tastic ‘Buy Box’ — is in the frame for an incoming opt-out representative legal action that’s been announced in the UK, seeking an estimated \u00a3900 million in damages to compensate tens of millions of consumers for alleged anti-competitive behavior.<\/p>\n
The key accusation of “The Amazon UK Buy Box Claim<\/a>” — as the opt-out collective action suit is being styled — is that Amazon uses the Buy Box, a feature it displays on product pages encouraging shoppers to add a particular seller’s item to their cart, to unlawfully favor its own product offers, obscuring better deals that could save shoppers money.<\/p>\n The suit will allege that Amazon uses a “secretive and self-favouring algorithm to ensure the Buy Box nearly always features goods sold directly by Amazon itself, or by third-party retailers who pay hefty storage and delivery fees to Amazon”, per a press release announcing the legal action.<\/p>\n This is a familiar charge, with both the UK’s competition authority (since this summer<\/a>) and the European Union’s antitrust unit (since 2020<\/a>) investigating Amazon’s criteria for sellers to feature in the Buy Box, probing concerns it artificially favors both its own retail offers and those of sellers that use its logistics and delivery services.<\/p>\n But the biggest punch to date has been landed by Italy — which fined Amazon ~$1.3BN at the end of last year <\/a>for abusing its market position through self-preferencing. Its competition watchdog found Amazon abused its position by giving preferential treatment to third-party sellers that use its logistics service — including a higher higher chance of being featured in the Buy Box — than those sellers not paying Amazon to use its logistics service.<\/p>\n