By Natalie DeCoste
Amazon is upping its fight against Congress and its proposed antitrust laws with the launch of a new website.
On Friday, Aug. 20, Amazon launched its new website called Support Small Sellers. The website allows the ecommerce giant to communicate with sellers about the newly proposed antitrust legislation.
In June, the U.S. House Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law introduced six bipartisan antitrust bills to take on Big Tech and update antitrust laws following a 16-month long investigation into Big Tech companies Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon.
The bills include measures to prevent Big Tech from engaging in conduct that advantages their products or services, disadvantages other business users, discriminates among similarly situated business users, and forces companies like Amazon to exit certain businesses.
Now, Amazon is attempting to fight this legislation through its new website. The website allows Amazon sellers to sign up to receive more information from Amazon’s public policy team about the package of antitrust legislation.
“Congress recently introduced a package of regulatory, legislative proposals targeted at a few large technology companies, including Amazon. While it is early in the legislative process, if enacted, these bills would jeopardize Amazon’s ability to operate a marketplace for sellers, potentially resulting in hundreds of thousands of American small and medium-sized businesses losing access to Amazon’s customers and services,” read the website.
The goal of Congress in putting these bills forward is to promote competition and end the market dominance of massive tech corporations. However, Amazon is pushing an opposite narrative to its sellers and instead alleging that if the new antitrust bills were to pass, small businesses would be hurt in the process.
“This would obviously hurt small businesses’ ability to generate the revenue they do today, and hurt hundreds of millions of consumers who appreciate the broad selection and lower prices that our selling partners provide,” read the website.
A spokesperson for Amazon confirmed that the website is legitimate in the statement, saying that sellers were seeking information about the proposed legislation and how it would impact their ability to sell products.
The website’s launch comes a few days after Amazon sent emails to a select group of third-party merchants about the legislation and how it could hinder the merchants’ ability to sell goods on Amazon’s platform. In the emails, representatives from Amazon’s public policy team asked to arrange a phone meeting to discuss the bills.
“We’re reaching out to a small group of our sellers to make them aware of a package of legislative proposals, currently in Congress, that is aimed at regulating Amazon and other large technology companies. It is early in the process, and the bills are subject to change, but we are concerned that they could potentially have significant negative effects on small and medium-sized businesses like yours that sell in our store,” the email states.
Amazon is most likely primarily concerned with the sixth bill in the antitrust package, known as H.R. 3825, the “Ending Platform Monopolies Act.”
Should it become law, it would force large technology companies like Amazon that operate and sell goods on a dominant platform to exit certain businesses. The bill was introduced by Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and is specifically aimed at curbing the power of major companies and spurring competition in digital markets. Rep. Jayapal said that the bill is based on previous antitrust actions like the AT&T breakup and the initial proposed breakup of Microsoft.
