FTC is looking into the Amazon/Apple deal that kicked many small resellers off Marketplace, has interviewed at least one reseller of refurbished MacBooks
Experts say the deal raises serious antitrust concerns — Last year, Amazon cut a deal with Apple to bring direct iPhone sales to its platform for the first time.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Amazon cut its 2018 deal to bring direct iPhone sales onto the platform, the price was an authorized-resellers-only rule that purged independent Apple device refurbishers from Marketplace overnight. By six months later, the damage was measurable: all but the largest Apple device resellers had vanished from Amazon entirely.
The FTC now interviewing a refurbished-MacBook reseller signals the agency is treating that purge as an antitrust matter, not a housekeeping change — and it echoes the agency's earlier scrutiny of Apple, including [[a:830910|its 2015 look at whether Apple illegally disadvantaged rival music streaming services in the App Store]].
First-order effects
- Independent Apple refurbishers — already reduced to a handful of survivors after the authorized-seller rule — become witnesses and evidence sources in a federal antitrust inquiry into the deal that removed them.
- Amazon and Apple's arrangement, which traded direct iPhone listings for the eviction of unauthorized sellers, now faces formal regulatory examination rather than press criticism alone.
Second-order effects
- Other brands with marketplace exclusivity deals face pressure to show their arrangements don't foreclose independent sellers the way the Apple pact did, before regulators generalize from this case.
- If the probe raises the cost of brand-sanctioned exclusivity on Amazon, surviving large authorized resellers gain a moat while any revival of small-refurbisher competition depends on the FTC's findings.
Third-order effects
- A pattern here — platform-plus-brand pacts that clear out smaller merchants drawing regulator attention — points toward antitrust doctrine catching up with marketplace gatekeeping as a competition issue, not just pricing or merger review.
The trend: Regulators are starting to police brand-and-marketplace exclusivity deals that concentrate resale channels in the hands of a few authorized players.