The Competition Bureau has secured a Federal Court order compelling Amazon to hand over internal records tied to its Marketplace Fair Pricing Policy. The move marks a decisive escalation in the agency’s alleged abuse-of-dominance investigation and signals that Ottawa is willing to test its beefed-up Competition Act on the country’s largest e-commerce player.
Introduced in November 2017, the company policy lets Amazon penalize third-party merchants who list products “significantly higher than recent prices offered on Amazon or elsewhere.” Regulators now want to know whether that rule lets Amazon charge sellers inflated fees, forces higher retail prices, or blocks cheaper listings on rival sites.
“There is no conclusion of wrongdoing at this time,” the Bureau stressed. Still, the compelled production order gives investigators a granular look at fee schedules, algorithmic triggers, and internal discussions that could reveal anti-competitive intent.
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Amazon controls about 40% of Canada’s online retail spend, according to industry estimates, dwarfing domestic rivals and making its seller fees effectively unavoidable for many merchants.
This is not Amazon’s first dance with Canadian antitrust enforcers. A 2020 Bureau inquiry examined similar pricing levers and sought public input on whether the tech giant leveraged its dominance to suppress competition. A parallel probe into Amazon’s marketing claims, launched in 2023, is still active.
The US Federal Trade Commission and 17 states also filed a sweeping antitrust suit against the company in 2023, alleging “interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies” that punish merchants for offering lower prices elsewhere.
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