A heavy fine of 200 million euros was imposed on Tuesday on Amazon and Apple in Italy.
The gendarme of the competition accuses them of having restricted access to the Amazon platform of certain resellers of Apple products.
The companies of the Amazon group were fined 68.7 million euros, and those of the Apple group a sanction of 134.5 million euros.
The investigation opened by the Italian Antitrust established "that certain clauses of the contract signed on October 31, 2018 prohibiting official and unofficial resellers of Apple and Beats products from using the Amazon.it platform" violated the European law.
An "unwarranted" decision according to Amazon
This contract authorized the sale of said Apple and Beats products only to Amazon itself, as well as to certain sellers "individually and in a discriminatory manner".
The survey established the "willingness" of Apple and Amazon "to introduce purely quantitative restrictions on the number of resellers" to increase their profits.
"We strongly disagree with the decision and we will appeal," responded Amazon in a statement, calling the sanction "unjustified and disproportionate."
The group denies taking advantage of the exclusion of resellers because “our business model is based on their success”.
Apple simply specified that an appeal would be presented.
Rain of investigations for the Gafa
The Italian investigation could serve as models for the German and Spanish competition authorities "which have also launched similar proceedings," said Antitrust.
For its part, the Italian association of consumers Codacons welcomed this fine.
"Any limitation of access to operators on electronic commerce platforms is a damage for consumers", declared the president of the association.
The Italian gendarme of competition is used to this kind of financial sanctions.
In May, he fined Google € 102 million for abuse of dominant position.
He accused the American giant of refusing the presence on Google Play of a third-party application to find charging stations for electric cars.
Many countries are investigating Gafa practices at this time.
The American competition authority (FTC) and many American states have launched investigations and lawsuits against Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, which they accuse of abusing a dominant position in their various markets, from social networks to from digital advertising to online commerce.
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