Germany's antitrust authority says it has launched an investigation into Amazon's influence over third-party traders selling on its platform
BERLIN (Reuters) - Germany's anti-trust authority has launched an investigation into Amazon's relationship with third-party traders selling on its site …
Context & Ripple Effects
This is round two, not a fresh fight: Germany's Federal Cartel Office had already opened an antitrust investigation into Amazon's "double role" as retailer and host for rival stores back in late 2018 (that earlier probe), and the European Commission followed with its own formal investigation into the same dual-role conduct in July 2019 (the Commission's probe).
The new investigation narrows in on Amazon's influence over the third-party traders who sell on its site — the sellers whose data and pricing sit inside Amazon's platform. It matters because Germany is Amazon's second-largest market after the US, and the Cartel Office has shown it will keep escalating: it later extended scrutiny to "brandgating" alongside Apple, and by mid-2025 issued a preliminary assessment that Amazon's marketplace price controls likely violate national and EU law (that warning).
First-order effects
- Amazon's treatment of third-party merchants on its German marketplace — fees, data access, buy-box placement — comes under formal antitrust examination, putting its seller relationships directly at legal risk.
- Third-party traders selling on Amazon.de gain an official channel to surface complaints about the platform's conduct, with the Cartel Office empowered to act on them.
Second-order effects
- Amazon now faces overlapping investigations from both Berlin and Brussels over the same dual-role structure, meaning any remedy negotiated with one authority will be benchmarked against the other's findings.
- The probe's scope sets a template for adjacent practices: within months the Cartel Office applied the same lens to brandgating with Apple, showing each finding widens the enforcement perimeter rather than closing a case.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds across the 2018 probe, the Commission's inquiry, the brandgating case, and the 2025 price-controls assessment, the endgame is structural: regulators pushing toward separating or constraining a marketplace operator's ability to compete against the sellers it hosts.
- For platform businesses generally, the case hardens the principle that controlling access to customers while competing on the same platform is itself an antitrust problem, independent of any single abusive act.
The trend: European regulators are moving from one-off probes of Amazon's dual role toward sustained, escalating oversight of how hybrid marketplaces treat the sellers they host.