A Wall Street Journal report revealed that Amazon employees in some instances may have used third-party seller data to inform the development and launch of the company’s own competing private-label products.1https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 The conduct is likely to be of interest to ongoing investigations by antitrust authorities in the US and Europe.
The European Commission has an open antitrust investigation into Amazon’s use of seller data,2https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_19_4291 while the US Federal Trade Commission is conducting a broad antitrust probe of the company.3https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-11/amazon-antitrust-probe-ftc-investigators-interview-merchants Even where Amazon’s use of third party data may be described by some as an unfair competitive edge, whether it violates competition laws is a big open question. Still, the report provides some interesting leads for the authorities.