👉 Background: Amazon has grown from online bookstore to now become "the everything store". They're not just selling products; they're also a major player in cloud computing, logistics, movie production, and pretty much every industry.

👉 What happened: They are so dominant that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now coming after them. The FTC alleges that Amazon:

• Forces sellers to list their products at the lowest prices on the web,
• Requires sellers to use Amazon's in-house logistics services if they want to get the best seller benefits, like "Prime" eligibility.

👉 What else: While the FTC's first step is to block Amazon from these anti-competitive behaviours, it hasn't shied away from making Amazon break up altogether!

What's the key learning?

💡Welcome to the US "techlash", where governments are increasingly willing to take on Big Tech... after a decade of being passive.

💡Now, regulators have realised there is a major risk in tech companies like Amazon, Google and Meta dominating the tech industry.

💡More recently, we've started to see the regulators make moves:

• Apple was forced to create a USB-C charging port to make it consistent with the rest of Europe.
• Meta was blocked by the UK competition regulator from acquiring Giphy for fear it would increase it social media power too much.
• Meta was also fined €1.2bn for mishandling data.

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