Germany's Federal Cartel Office says it has opened an antitrust investigation into Amazon's “double role” as retailer and host for other stores
- German Cartel Office looking at how firm treats site's sellers — Probe focuses on terms, adding to EU scrutiny of data abuse
Context & Ripple Effects
The Federal Cartel Office's 2018 opening move targets the same conflict the European Commission formalized a year later in its dual-role marketplace investigation: Amazon both sells first-party goods and sets the terms for the third-party stores it hosts. Germany is the natural venue — it is Amazon's largest EU market after the UK, so seller-treatment decisions there set de facto standards across Europe.
What makes this opening consequential is how long a tail it produced: the office followed up with a brandgating probe alongside Apple in 2020, a formal proceeding against Amazon in 2021, and by 2025 a preliminary finding that Amazon's marketplace retailer price controls likely violate national and EU law. The 2018 terms-and-data-abuse framing was the template for all of them.
First-order effects
- Amazon's third-party sellers in Germany are the immediate constituency: the probe puts their contract terms — fees, data access, buy-box treatment — under regulatory review for the first time at national level.
- Amazon now faces parallel scrutiny from Bonn and Brussels over the identical conduct, meaning any settlement or remedy negotiated with one authority becomes evidence in the other.
Second-order effects
- Sellers gain negotiating leverage they lacked before: documented regulator interest in seller terms gives merchants grounds to contest fee increases and data-sharing demands rather than accept them as take-it-or-leave-it.
- Other hybrid marketplaces operating in Germany face the same playbook being built against Amazon — the Cartel Office's findings on dual-role conduct become the reference case for any platform that both competes with and hosts its own suppliers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, marketplace regulation converges on structural remedies — separating retail operations from platform governance or mandating data firewalls — rather than case-by-case fines, which is the direction the subsequent German proceedings and the Commission's work point toward.
- National competition authorities establish themselves as first movers on platform conduct, with the EU layer following: Germany's early probes effectively pre-tried the arguments Brussels later adopted.
The trend: Marketplace platforms that compete with their own sellers are moving from tolerated hybrid models to regulated utilities, with Germany's Cartel Office running the longest-running enforcement arc against Amazon's dual role.