Amazon and Meta settled separate U.K. antitrust investigations by agreeing to stop practices that give them an unfair advantage over merchants and customers using their platforms, the watchdog said Friday.
The Competition and Markets Authority said it accepted the committments from the U.S. tech companies to close the investigations into their online marketplaces.
The watchdog had been investigating whether Amazon was harming competition and hurting consumers by giving preference to merchants paying for extras like storage, packaging and delivery.
The CMA said Amazon will no longer be able to use data from third-party sellers to give itself an edge. Sellers can negotiate their own delivery rates with independent delivery services and they’ll get a fair shot at the buy box, it said.
The U.K. watchdog’s Meta probe focused on whether the social media company’s collection and use of data gave it the upper hand over competitors providing classified data and online dating services.
Regulators were examining whether the way Facebook Marketplace is embedded into the social network allowed it an advantage in reaching customers and shutting out competing sites.
“Going forward, competitors of Facebook Marketplace that advertise on Meta platforms can ‘opt out’ of their data being used to improve Facebook Marketplace,” the CMA said.
Meta has also pledged to limit how it uses ad data when developing products, the watchdog said.
Meta said it welcomed the decision to close the case. The EU has accused Meta of antitrust breaches in a similar ongoing case.
