European Union officials are readying antitrust charges against Amazon.com Inc. that could be filed as early as next week, the Wall Street Journal reported today.

Sources told the publication that the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch and top competition regulator, has been probing Amazon’s treatment of third-party merchants on its marketplace for close to two years. The charges are expected to accuse the company of using data it collects about those merchants to compete with them. 

Amazon is not only an e-commerce marketplace operator but also sells its own private-label products on its marketplace. In some cases, those products compete with merchandise sold by the hundreds of thousands of third-party merchants that offer their wares via Amazon. In April, a Wall Street Journal report cited former Amazon employees as saying that executives had accessed sales data from third-party sellers to help the company develop competing private-label products.

Those access requests reportedly violated corporate policies Amazon had put in place to prevent such data misuse. “We strictly prohibit our employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch,” an Amazon spokesperson stressed in a statement after the April report. “While we don’t believe these claims are accurate, we take these allegations very seriously and have launched an internal investigation.”

An Amazon lawyer told Congress in a hearing last year that “we don’t use individual seller data directly to compete with them.”

The European Commission’s investigation to determine if Amazon broke antitrust law is expected to take at least a year, according to today’s report. The company could face a fine of as much as 10% of its annual revenue and may be ordered to change business practices found to be in violation of competition rules. Amazon would have the option of appealing such a decision should it arrive.

Other tech giants have also found themselves in regulatory cross hairs over their data use. Last December, the European Commission announced that it had opened preliminary antitrust investigation into Google LLC and Facebook Inc. focused on the way user information is “processed, used and monetized, including for advertising purposes” on their services. 

In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission this February started looking into whether any past acquisitions made by tech giants had harmed the competition. Apple Inc., Amazon, Google and Facebook are also the subject of a House Judiciary Committee antitrust probe. The last two companies are each facing multistate investigations as well, likewise focused on antitrust matters. 

Photo: Amazon