Amazon Australia declined to describe the workings of its product search system to the Australian competition regulator, according to a document published on Thursday.
The position of the company founded by Jeff Bezos was mentioned by the Australian Competition and Consumption Commission (ACCC) in a document, the same that contained the same five-year review of the regulation of large technology companies involving Facebook and Google.
Image: Lev Radin/Shutterstock
The retention of information, now established by Amazon, echoes decisions taken by Facebook and Google, from Alphabet, which resulted in the payment of royalties for content to media organizations by these companies in Australian territory.
The ACCC’s request for clarification on the workings of Amazon’s algorithm comes after the Commission interviewed 80 online merchants and almost half of them said they believed that major marketplace platforms distorted research and site presentation in order to favor internal products. “Amazon products are always listed first, then second-hand products are available in small print at the bottom of the listing,” says an anonymous survey respondent.
Amazon had told the regulator that it did not give its own products an edge, but “ACCC sought details about inputs from Amazon’s algorithms, which were not provided,” the report said.
‘These are the ones we think customers will prefer’, says Amazon about search result
After denying information on how Amazon’s algorithms produce search results, the company’s director of public policy in the country, Michael Cooley, said in a statement that the company’s offerings were “those we think customers will prefer, regardless of whether from Amazon or one of our seller partners.”
Cooley added that partner sellers receive direct data about their respective businesses. This data included “online tools that provide analytics data about their own sales, the number of customers who view the products they sell and their conversion rates,” the executive said.
Image: Marques Thomas Querysprout/Unsplash
Despite Amazon’s sales representing a quarter of the A$5.3 billion ($3.8 billion) generated by eBay, the ACCC sees concerns about possible preferential treatment in Amazon’s sales. “Hybrid markets, like other vertically integrated digital platforms, face conflicts of interest and may act in ways that favor their own products with potentially adverse effects,” said ACCC President Gina Cass-Gottlieb in a statement accompanying the report. .
According to the regulator, allowing large platforms to give preferential treatment to their own products can influence purchasing decisions and harm competition.
The report says platforms should be made to publicize any activities that favor their own products. “We have concerns about particular examples of self-preference for hybrid markets in Australia, which mirror similar concerns raised by foreign regulators,” says Cass-Gottlieb.
Via Reuters