The EU will investigate how Amazon handles retailers' data

Amazon may have been misusing data from independent retailers trading through its platform, and the EU is going to look into it -- and potentially impose hefty fines on the e-commerce giant.

The European Commission launched a formal antitrust investigation into the matter Wednesday.

The EC argues that Amazon has a dual role: It sells products on its own marketplace and it provides a platform for independent retailers to sell through Amazon, too. But the Commission's preliminary investigation found that Amazon uses "competitively sensitive information" about these independent retailers, possibly to their detriment.

The EC is particularly interested in Amazon's "Buy Box" -- a prominent feature on Amazon that lets consumers buy items from a specific retailer -- and how Amazon selects which retailers shows up there.

"European consumers are increasingly shopping online. E-commerce has boosted retail competition and brought more choice and better prices. We need to ensure that large online platforms don't eliminate these benefits through anti-competitive behaviour. I have therefore decided to take a very close look at Amazon's business practices and its dual role as marketplace and retailer, to assess its compliance with EU competition rules,” Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said in a statement.

You might remember Vestager's name from other antitrust investigations, particularly those into Google's and Apple's practices, which ended up in multi-billion-dollar fines for the U.S. tech companies. Vestager's term ends this fall, probably to the relief of President Donald Trump, who recently said the EU treats the U.S. "worse than China," and that Vestager "hates the United States perhaps worse than any person I've ever met."

When asked for comment, Amazon gave us the following statement: "We will cooperate fully with the European Commission and continue working hard to support businesses of all sizes and help them grow."