Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced on Friday that US giants Amazon and Meta have pledged to enhance their practices to mitigate undue competition fears on their online selling platforms.
The competition watchdog said it had accepted the pledges.
This marks the end of investigations the CMA had opened on the issue. The watchdog had examined, in particular, practices by Amazon that possibly favoured its direct sales over third-party vendors on its platform.
Amazon has committed to giving independent sellers an “equal chance” to promote their product and to refrain from using competitor seller data for any unfair advantage, the CMA noted in a statement.
The CMA opened the investigation in 2022 to ascertain whether Amazon was “in a dominant position in the UK and whether it was abusing this position.”
An Amazon spokesperson said in a statement that the company welcomed the resolution, and that it would preserve Amazon’s ability to serve both its customers and over 100,000 small and medium-sized businesses that trade within the UK via its platform.
In December, Brussels declared in a similar procedure that it had persuaded Amazon to cease alleged anticompetitive practices in the European Union, particularly pertaining to the use of independent seller data on its site.
The CMA had started an investigation in 2021 to determine whether Meta had obtained an unfair advantage over its competitors, mainly those providing online classified advertisement services.
Such competitors of Facebook who also employ Meta's platforms can now refuse to allow certain parts of their advertising data to be utilised by the Californian giant, according to the CMA.
Meta has also committed to limiting how it uses this data in the development of its products, the CMA added.
The American company said in a statement on Friday that it welcomed the CMA’s decision to close its investigation and pledged to “implement systems and controls to confirm and validate that competitor advertiser data are not used.”
A similar investigation into Meta's practices by the European Commission is still ongoing.
