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Amazon is accused of artificially raising the price of goods online and of attempting to achieve an ‘unlawful monopoly’.
A US appeals court has revived an antitrust case against Amazon, which accuses the tech giant of driving up prices and maintaining an “unlawful monopoly”.
This case was originally filed in 2021 against Amazon but it was tossed out of court a year later. The New York Times reported that the 2022 court filing didn’t seem to indicate why the judge dismissed the case.
The antitrust lawsuit accuses Amazon of artificially raising the price of goods to consumers on online marketplaces. This is because third-party sellers “were forced to incorporate Amazon’s high fees and commissions into their product prices” whether they sold their products on Amazon’s store or on rival marketplaces.
Amazon had a policy that required sellers to sell products at their lowest prices on its own marketplaces, but replaced this in 2019 in response to scrutiny from Congress and government regulators. However, the appeals judgment says the alternative policy created by Amazon – the “fair pricing policy” – is “an effectively identical substitute”.
The case says Amazon’s “anticompetitive conduct” marks the maintenance of an unlawful monopoly, or an attempt by the company to achieve a monopoly. An Amazon spokesperson told The Verge that it disagrees with the appeals court judgment.
“Just like any store owner who wouldn’t want to promote a bad deal to their customers, we don’t highlight or promote offers that are not competitively priced,” the spokesperson said.
Major antitrust cases
The US is involved in multiple high-profile cases against tech giants, accusing them of maintaining monopoly power in their respective sectors.
Amazon itself is in the middle of another antitrust case, which was filed by the Federal Trade Commission. This case accuses Amazon of using a mix of “anticompetitive and unfair strategies” to illegally maintain monopoly power, degrading quality for shoppers, overcharging sellers, stifling innovation and preventing rivals from fairly competing.
Meanwhile, Google was recently judged as having monopoly power in the search market and that its distribution agreements have “anticompetitive effects”. The tech giant is at risk of being broken up after the verdict.
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