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The European Union announced formal antitrust charges against Amazon and has opened a second investigation into the business practices of the company and could levy enormous fines; plus, more of today’s top news.
On Tuesday, Margrethe Vestager, the top antitrust official from the European Union has accused Amazon of illegally abusing its dominant position as an online marketplace in France and Germany, the two largest markets in the European Union in which the company operates. The EU has opened a second investigation into the business practices of the company, CNN reported.
In July 2019, the commission from European Union opened a formal investigation into Amazon (AMZN) examining its dual role as both a retailer and a marketplace. The commission has been investigating agreements between Amazon and independent retailers, in particular, whether data from sellers is being unfairly used by the e-commerce giant, which also sells its own products.
Vestager said that the EU investigation found that Amazon feeds non-public seller data, such as the number of products ordered and the sellers’ revenues, into its own retail algorithms to help it decide which new products to launch and the price of each new offer.
Vester added that this data allows Amazon to effectively marginalize third-party sellers and “their ability to grow.”
“We do not take issue with the success of Amazon or its size,” Vester clarified, “our concern is the very specific business conduct that appears to distort competition.”
The commission said Amazon could face potential fines of 10 percent of its annual global sales, with a maximum penalty of around $37 billion, based on the company’s forecast for revenue this year.
A test kit prepared in a small infectious disease lab of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta knowingly released a flawed test kit for COVID-19.
NPR reports that the lab built and designed the diagnostic test kit in record time. However, NPR says it learned that the results of the final quality control test the kit could fail 33% of the time.
In spite of this, lab officials released the kit anyway. The revelation came from an internal CDC review, known as a “root-cause analysis,” which the agency conducted to understand why an early coronavirus test didn’t work properly and wound up costing scientists precious weeks in the early days of a pandemic.
In what may be proof that the World Health Organization (WHO) hid a “sweetheart” deal with China, a report by the New York Times found that in mid-February, a WHO team arrived in Beijing to begin investigating the origin of the coronavirus, the Daily Wire reported.
“What the team members did not know was that they would not be allowed to investigate the source at all. The organization’s [WHO] leadership had quietly negotiated terms that sidelined its own experts,” The Times said. “Despite [Michael Ryan, the World Health Organization’s emergency director’s] pronouncements, and over the advice of its emergency committee,” the terms were that “they would not question China’s initial response or even visit the live-animal market in the city of Wuhan where the outbreak seemed to have originated.”
The New York Times report added that the WHO “has refused to disclose details of its negotiations with Beijing and hasn’t shared documents with member states outlining the terms of its investigations.”
