The FBI (FTC) said in a lawsuit to combat monopoly – that Amazon routinely classifies its own products before elements of competitors.
FTC added that the results of Amazon search are biased for the company, even when you know that competing products are of great quality, which helps to extract retail stores online what the agency called “huge monopolistic rents from everyone at hand.”
FTC’s search allegations help form the foundation for a broader lawsuit accusing Amazon from suffocating competition by punishing sellers whose goods can be bought at a cheap price in other places, and by asking the sellers to use the Amazon service to provide “main” charging faster.
“Amazon has used a set of punitive and elderly tactics to maintain its monopolies illegally,” Lina Khan, FTC president, said in a written statement.
The agency, along with 17 state lawyers, filed the lawsuit at a federal provincial court in Seattle. The complaint comes after nearly two years after the encoding investigations found that products from the Amazon -owned brands or exclusively to Amazon were classified before the other elements were in the search results, including in cases where the competitors were the highest rankings for customers and more reviews. The investigation found that knowing if a product from the Amazon brand can predict whether it gets the highest research in the 70 % of the time, making this factor more important than the productivity of the product stars or the number of review.
When the Amazon brand took the highest search spot, it was usually classified as “distinctive from our brands”, and Amazon at that time told the signs that these results are “distinctive” are “trio” places instead of searching or advertising results. She also denied that she preferred her own commercial brands.
Amazon did not answer questions about the requests for classification of research in FTC, and instead, she pointed to a statement issued by the Vice President of Amazon, global public policy and general adviser David Zabolsky, who wrote on Tuesday that the lawsuit “was wrong in the facts and law, and we look forward to submitting this case in the court.”
He also wrote: “FTC’s practices have helped stimulate competition and innovation through the retail industry, and have produced more choice, lower prices, faster delivery speeds to Amazon customers and a greater opportunity for many companies that sell in the Amazon store.”
In its instead, FTC said that Amazon “accumulation of deck” in the search results against competitors by “burying the organic content under the user interface recommendation, such as” Expert Recommendation Tool “, which displays special posters from Amazon” to others. The agency said that these recommendations were completely out of the search, as it was presented on the pages of the product details or on the pages that submitted proposals for customers, to renew the products that were previously purchased, for example.
The lawsuit can contain additional specific allegations about Amazon search classifications, because the classification section in the public version of the complaint contains several revised paragraphs. FTC spokeswoman Victor Graham said that parts of the complaint have been revised because they contain non -general information.
Robert Gomez, an Amazon seller who criticized the “unfair company’s advantages” in achieving signs for 2021, said that it became more difficult for the Amazon in the years that followed to achieve a profit on the coffee line of coffee products such as mills and fermentation. He said that the results of his sponsor are increasingly dominating the top of the search results, which makes the announcement of the price ads crucial, and he said that Amazon has stopped him from the most important “purchase box”, through which he distributes to distribute sales from Amazon, on that, he must push him to the existence of an additional product for him.
Gomez said that despite his encouragement from the FTC suit, because it will draw more attention to what Amazon Market considers the unequal, he said, “I do not carry my breath” to achieve a result that helps the sellers like it. Even if the agency is able to recycle the practices that it considers unlawful illegal, it will leave other practices that Gomez did not touch, Gomez, the broken Gomez, said in the margins of independent sellers, such as Amazon that sells the search results that are sponsored or selling some brands directly, which means that these brands do not have to work as their own seller in the Amazon market, and thus end with definitely Smaller to Amazon.
“These anti -competition practices are still taking place, and now more than ever, we are affected by it,” Gomez said.
Update, September 28, 2023
This story was updated to note that Amazon did not answer specific questions about the FTC search classification claims.
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