The technology companies Amazon and Apple have been fined more than 200 million euros for establishing a “restrictive agreement” that prevented other legitimate distributors of Californian brand products from operating on the electronic commerce platform, as reported by the Authority on Tuesday. guarantor of the Competition and Market of Italy.
Under the agreement reached between the two companies and signed on October 31, 2018, according to the Antitrust Authority, “only Amazon and certain distributors chosen individually and in a discriminatory way” could sell Apple and Beats products (a well-known brand of headphones) in the platform Amazon.it, in an infringement of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. The companies of the Amazon group will have to pay 68.7 million euros and those of the Apple group, 134.5 million euros.
The inquiries revealed “the will [de Amazon y Apple] to introduce a purely quantitative restriction on the number of distributors ”in order to increase their profits. The agreement and the “restrictive nature of these conducts” is more serious because “Amazon.it represents the e-commerce establishment where at least 70% of purchases of consumer electronic products are made in Italy, of which at least 40% is represented by retailers that use Amazon as an intermediation platform ”, it adds in its statement the Italian competition authority.
Antitrust highlights that “it is essential that the application of the competition rules guarantee a level playing field for all retailers that use the marketplaces. [como Amazon] as an increasingly important place for the development of its commercial activities, especially in the current context, avoiding discriminatory behaviors that restrict competition ”.
The Italian regulator recalls that the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the EU establishes that “distribution systems, to be compatible with the rules of competition, must be based on criteria of a qualitative nature, non-discriminatory and applied in the same way to all potential distributors ”. The investigation has served as a model “for the national competition authorities of Germany and Spain, which have launched procedures similar to the Italian one,” says the agency.
The fine comes as several EU countries have multiplied surveillance and sanctions on US and Chinese tech giants in recent months in an attempt to better regulate their activities. The Italian supervisor himself fined Google 102 million euros this past May for abuse of a dominant position by restricting access to its Google Play mobile application store to an application for locating electric vehicle charging points.
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