Amazon has quietly altered agreements with sellers on its marketplace, the Verge reported. The company will no longer make third-party sellers price their products on Amazon lower than anywhere else.
Price parity agreements, or most-favoured nations clauses as they are sometimes called, were used by Amazon in contracts with third-party sellers to ensure that businesses selling products on the platform did not sell the same products for cheaper on any other platform like eBay or Alibaba.
Amazon declined to comment on the matter.
The practice was stopped in Europe a few years after regulators in Germany and the UK started an investigation into the practice. Amazon remains under investigation by the EU for other alleged discriminatory practices against third-party sellers, in particular access to their sales data, while competition regulators in Germany and Austria are also looking at whether the company abuses its dominant position in the marketplace.
Last December, US Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) wrote to the the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission demanding an investigation into these anti-competitive provisions in Amazon’s contracts. More recently, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said she would consider breaking up big tech companies like Amazon, as they have an unfair competitive advantage in providing a platform both for their own and other businesses' products.
