The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has announced commitments from Amazon [AMZN:US]and Meta [META:US] to uphold fair competition on their retail platforms, as reported by The Guardian on November 3. Amazon has agreed to provide independent sellers with a fair opportunity for their offers to be featured in the prominent “Buy Box” section on its product pages, enabling instant customer purchases. Concurrently, Meta has committed to refraining from exploiting advertising customers’ data. This ensures that competitors of Facebook Marketplace, advertising on Meta platforms, can opt out of sharing their data to enhance Facebook Marketplace.

The CMA’s investigation, launched in July 2022, focused on Amazon’s alleged misuse of its dominant position in the UK’s online retail sector. Findings revealed that Amazon Retail offers were disproportionately selected as the Featured Offer on product pages, accounting for over 80% of cases. This practice allegedly disadvantaged competing sellers and prioritized Amazon’s profits over customer benefits. Additionally, both the CMA and the European Commission had initiated separate but collaborative investigations into Meta’s purported unfair exploitation of business data for competitive advantage in June 2021. The commitments from Amazon and Meta signify significant progress in the CMA’s efforts to curb major tech companies from abusing market dominance and create a level playing field in the digital marketplace sector.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/nov/03/amazon-facebook-meta-consumers-cma

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-secures-improvements-in-ways-amazon-and-meta-treat-competitors-benefitting-customers

https://www.reuters.com/technology/uk-competition-regulator-says-meta-offers-limit-use-ad-data-2023-05-26/