Some years ago we lived a major trade war between Amazon and Apple, Apple did not allow its products to be sold on the Amazon market, and Amazon blocked all its services on Cupertino devices. An absurd war that ended with the entry of an Apple store on Amazon, and with the arrival of Amazon services to Apple devices. But this led to a new problem: Apple is responsible for setting prices on Amazon and gave them the exclusivity of their products. Now, the Italian competition body has just sanctioned both companies with 200 million euros for setting prices ...
And it is that we are facing a violation of competition. Amazon Italy accounts for nothing more and nothing less than 70% of electronic product sales in Italy, and Apple is the one that sets prices and does not allow retailers to market their products on Amazon, a discrimination for which these new sanctions are applied. According to the competition regulator in Italy,
It is essential that the application of competition rules guarantee a level playing field for all retailers that use electronic marketplaces, such as Amazon, as an increasingly important place for the development of their commercial activities, especially in the current context, avoiding conduct discriminatory that restrict competition.
We will see what happens in other countries since This fine sentence comes within a regulatory framework whereby many other European Union countries would be intensively monitoring technology giants of the United States in order to impose sanctions so that they apply good competition practices. That is why Apple is not going to be the only one fined, many others will be sanctioned in a similar way. After all this, we can only think that the states try to protect us as consumers, and in the end we are the ones who have to decide what to buy or not, and for them it is essential that there is good competition in the market.
