Justice Dept. Joins DC’s Antitrust Action Against Amazon

The Biden administration has asked a judge to review a suit accusing Amazon of anticompetitive behavior, Bloomberg writes, to possibly bring it back after it was dismissed.

The suit, previously dismissed in March, alleged Amazon’s contracts with merchants had inflated prices.

The judge found no evidence that that was true.

The U.S. Justice Department is going back over it, though, saying the ruling had improperly blended two areas of analysis that had been “crucial” for establishing the claims.

“If left uncorrected, the court’s ruling could jeopardize the enforcement of antitrust law by improperly raising the bar on plaintiffs challenging anticompetitive contractual restraints in the District of Columbia,” the Justice Department said.

The Justice Department isn’t a party to the suit.

Attorney General Karl Racine had sued Amazon in 2021, saying the eCommerce titan encourages “higher than necessary” consumer prices by guaranteeing the tech giant gets a minimum profit on every item sold, but discouraging merchants from offering lower prices outside of Amazon.

Big tech firms have been getting more investigations all over as of late, with many official bodies objecting to the way they do business in various countries.

PYMNTS wrote that regulators have been looking into Amazon and its business practices, including how it uses third-party seller data for private label businesses.

Read more: SEC Investigates Amazon for Use of Third-Party Sellers’ Data

The SEC is looking into how the site has dealt with disclosures of its employees’ use of data from sellers on the site, with the enforcement division asking for emails from various senior execs.

A WSJ investigation found in April 2020 that Amazon employees had used individual third-party seller data numerous times to develop products for its own brands, with the company denying that.

The report said Amazon had since debuted its own internal look into the private-label division. No report is available from that effort.

Last month, some of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee referred Amazon and some top execs to the Justice Department on charges of possibly obstructing investigations into the private-label business operations.