2y ago

Amazon And Apple Fined $218 Million For Elbowing Out Small Retailers In Spain

www.huffpost.com Amazon And Apple Fined $218 Million For Elbowing Out Small Retailers In Spain

Regulators said the tech giants colluded to box out competitors by favoring sales of Apple products directly from the online retail giant.

Amazon And Apple Fined $218 Million For Elbowing Out Small Retailers In Spain::Regulators said the tech giants colluded to box out competitors by favoring sales of Apple products directly from the online retail giant.

18 comments

Cost of doing business.
- Yup, it’s not like this is going to bring the smaller players back
  
  Exactly - also, they'll never see any of those millions or am i wrong?

Oh no 218 million for two companies that have a higher GDP than 95% of nations, how will they ever recover?
- This is next to nothing for them.
  However, stay tuned because supposedly the ftc is going after them.
  
  American regulators going after anyone is a cute dream.

Which couch will they look in to find all that money??

They really do need to compute fines like this on gross revenue, not profit.

$218 Million to them is like a penny to me :/ what a fine

This is a strange lawsuit. Is Spain suing BestBuy for not allowing third party sellers to hock Apple equipment in their store? I mean, Amazon is a retailer, they can choose to sell or not sell whomever’s goods they want to.
Amazon had a real problem with counterfeit and used Apple products flooding their site, so they did something about it. Now Spain wants to make sure you can buy cheap crap that doesn’t work and isn’t the real thing?
- They're suing for not allowing the sale of refurbished articles, which was contrary to the agreement signed by the people who sold the refurbished articles.
- Amazon is a retailer, they can choose to sell or not sell whomever’s goods they want to.
  Amazon is also platform operator. This is about Amazon being the direct seller on the selling platform operated by this company called Amazon vs third party seller selling Apple products on the platform operated by this company called Amazon.
  Meaning stuff like Amazon placing their own direct sell offer higher on results or as said how prominently they featured advertising by their party sellers.
  This is the danger of trying to operate both as the retailer and as the platform operator on same market place. Competition authority will very carefully scrutinise ones operating of the market platform on benefit of ones retail sales.
  Direct single party retail webshops don't have this problem. Neither do pure marketplace platform, where they just run the marketplace and don't offer any first party product sales.
  They could choose to not do third party sellers and be pure first party retailer. However then their selection would be smaller. Since third party sellers cover much of the niches not lucrative enough for amazon itself to cover. Then Amazon wouldn't be the "buy everything" store, which would also hurt their retail business. Since the default move wouldn't be "well lets first look on amazon, they have everything there".
  Amazon is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Competition authority is saying "hold on there now, you either eat it or keep it. No cheating and double dipping." If you are to be both market place and retailer, there needs to be firewall between those two divisions and fair dealing with the other retailers on your marketplace.
  
  That’s interesting, but I would think if that was the problem it would apply to more than just Apple.
- Yeah, at first I figured this was about how Amazon takes out successful, smaller retailers on its site by offering the same product at a slightly lower price/de-prioritizing their search results, which is fucked, but this seems to be only about Apple products? Very bizarre…

18 comments