San Francisco (AFP)
A coalition of American unions is calling on regulators to investigate the "anti-competitive practices" of Amazon, the online retail giant, which they accuse of lowering wages and promoting its own products on its platform.
"Amazon's multiple roles as a marketplace, vendor and provider of logistics and cloud computing facilitate its anti-competitive practices, sources of profit, and its predominance allows it to reduce the choice of employees, consumers, merchants and competitors, "argues the coalition.
The five unions, which claim to represent 5.3 million workers in all sectors of the economy, presented their petition on Thursday to the federal agency responsible for consumer protection and competition (FTC).
"The petitioners call on authorities like the FTC to protect workers from the unbridled powers of ever-larger and fewer employers," write the unions.
They would also like the regulators to help the SMEs present on the platforms to work in fairer conditions.
Amazon is regularly accused by its competitors and detractors of abusing its double position - both referee and player - on its e-commerce platform where its products are sold alongside those of independent companies.
The coalition wants the FTC to determine in particular whether Amazon exercises direct or indirect price control on its platforms, whether it highlights its products in search results and whether it uses the data collected on consumers as a competitive advantage. .
The same fears exist for the cloud computing department of the Seattle firm.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominates the market for remote computing services. Research firms lend it between 30 and 50% of the global public cloud market share.
The group led by the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, is already in the crosshairs of the federal authorities, just like other large technological groups (Apple, Google, Facebook ...).
The US Department of Justice launched a large investigation in late July into possible anti-competitive practices by the giants of Silicon Valley.
As for the FTC, it recently ordered these companies to provide information and documents relating to their transactions between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019, to examine possible anti-competitive practices.
Amazon did not respond to a request from AFP.
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