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Washington sues Amazon for monopolistic practices

2021-05-27T05:24:45.793Z


The prosecution accuses the technology of making consumers pay higher prices 'online' Amazon trucks in Staten Island, New York.Mark Lennihan / AP The attorney general of the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, filed an antitrust suit against Amazon on Tuesday, which he accuses of prohibiting sellers from offering their products at lower prices on any other online platform, including their own websites, causing consumers to pay "artificially high" prices. Jeff Bezos' technology comp


Amazon trucks in Staten Island, New York.Mark Lennihan / AP

The attorney general of the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, filed an antitrust suit against Amazon on Tuesday, which he accuses of prohibiting sellers from offering their products at lower prices on any other online platform, including their own websites, causing consumers to pay "artificially high" prices.

Jeff Bezos' technology company has immediately rejected Racine's accusation, ensuring that third-party merchants who use its platform - who offer half of the products that the technology sells - set their own prices.

Amazon "maximizes its profits at the expense of third-party sellers and consumers, while harming competition, stifling innovation and illegally tilting the playing field in its favor," the Democratic prosecutor said in a statement released Tuesday.

The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the country's regulatory authority on competition and consumer rights, has been investigating since 2019 whether the company is using its market power to harm competition , an investigation that has not led to legal action.

Several states, including California and New York, have conducted their own research on the company's contract policies.

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Jack Evans, a spokesman for Amazon, responded in a statement that prosecutor Racine understood the company's policies "exactly the other way around."

"Sellers set their own prices for the products they offer in our store," said Evans, adding that Amazon reserves the right "not to highlight offers that are not competitively priced to customers."

Last year the House of Representatives' top antitrust commission completed a comprehensive 16-month investigation that concluded that Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook engaged in anti-competitive practices. Bezos's company competes with some of the smaller sellers who offer their products on its platform, which "pushes Amazon to exploit its access to the data and information of competing sellers, among other anti-competitive behavior," it read. the Congress document.

Tuesday's antitrust lawsuit is the penultimate effort by a prosecution to limit the power of the tech giants, although those filed last year against Facebook and Google were different.

In 2020, dozens of state prosecutors organized to jointly indict the companies in federal court.

In the case of the District of Columbia, where the city of Washington is located, the prosecutor Racine filed the lawsuit alone and in a district court, so the sentence or agreement reached by the parties will be valid only in the US capital.

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Source: elparis

All business articles on 2021-05-27

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