American technology giants may have to scream.
On September 11, according to foreign media reports, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has launched a survey of Amazon. Currently, the survey is only aimed at small sellers of the Amazon Marketplace, focusing on their dependence on Amazon to determine whether Amazon is using its strong position to undermine the level playing field.
This is a pre-publicized survey. According to the Wall Street Journal and other reports, earlier this year, the FTC and the Justice Department have begun to split their actions and launch anti-monopoly investigations against technology giants. Facebook, Apple, Google, and Amazon are on their lists. Among them, FTC is responsible for Facebook and Amazon. Investigation.
Facebook and Google have been on the fire. According to Facebook’s earnings report, in June this year, the FTC has begun to investigate its monopolistic behavior. On September 7, Google first admitted to being an antitrust investigation, and the Ministry of Justice asked Google to provide relevant consultation and files at the end of August.
In addition to federal agencies, big technology companies have become the target of the states. On September 6, the New York State Attorney General announced that several weeks were participating in an antitrust investigation against Facebook. On Monday, the 48-week prosecutor from the United States launched an antitrust investigation against Google, and only California and Alabama did not participate.
And they have long been starved by the EU. In September last year, EU antitrust commissioner Margaret Vestag had initiated a preliminary investigation into Amazon to assess how Amazon uses third-party merchant data on the platform. In July this year, the European Commission officially announced the launch of an anti-monopoly investigation against Amazon. The main focus remains on the use of third-party merchant data and whether it violates the competition law.
and Facebook, Google, Amazon is already lucky. In the anti-monopoly field, Google was fined three times in 2017 by the European Union. At most, it was fined 4.34 billion euros, adding up to 8.2 billion euros three times. Facebook also acquired WhatsApp in 2017 and was fined 110 million euros by the EU.
The United States is still gentler than the European Union. The current survey of Amazon has just begun. According to foreign media reports, several lawyers including at least one and at least one economist have been inquired for about 90 minutes. The US technology circle may have a long time of turmoil.