A heavy fine of 200 million euros was imposed Tuesday on Amazon and Apple in Italy by the gendarme of the competition who accuses the two internet giants of having restricted access to the Amazon platform of certain resellers of Apple products .
The Italian Antitrust “imposed a sanction of 68.7 million euros on companies of the Amazon group and a sanction of 134.5 million euros on companies of the Apple group”.
The investigation opened by the Italian authority “made it possible to establish 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 and allowing the sale of Apple and Beats products in this market only to Amazon and to certain sellers chosen individually and in a discriminatory manner, violates article 101 of the Treaty of functioning of the EU ”.
According to the Italian gendarme, the investigation also made it possible to establish “the will” of the two companies “to introduce purely quantitative restrictions on the number of resellers” in order to increase their earnings.
This behavior is all the more serious in the eyes of the Italian Antitrust as Amazon “represents the electronic commerce site where at least 70% of purchases of consumer electronics products are made in Italy”.
Italy is not the only country to take a close look at the behavior of these big technology companies which dominate the world market.
The American competition authority (FTC) and many American states have thus launched investigations and prosecutions against Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon, the famous GAFA, which they accuse of abusing a dominant position in their various markets. , from social networks to digital advertising to e-commerce.
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