Do amazon treat the kindle differently from other ebook readers on their site? If, for example, kobo fits my search better and they demote it while putting kindle content right at the top. Does that kind of thing happen?
In which case, quite possibly, if
* amazon can be argued to have a very large position, with the vast majority of searches going through it
* it can be shown that people tend to click almost exclusively on the first or first few links
* they are treating their own, different, service more favourably than competitors (and remember when in the context of google, it's how people would find the competitors in the first place)
* you can see them having hugely increased sales for their own product after the introduction, and massively decreased sales for other people
But then my understanding of the regulations comes largely from the links here.
Fundamentally though, if you're big enough to be concerned about this you should be able to afford the legal teams to figure this out or approach the commission to discuss what is and is not within the regulations.
To answer your first question, since I don't think it was rhetorical, I'm aware of at least 1 case where amazon stopped selling competing products (1).
I also just searched for "aaa batteries" and the first hit, after the AmazonBasics ad, were AmazonBasics batteries.
I'm not saying either of these are anti-competitive. I understand that more goes into it than just that. Just offering these little facts in case anyone else is curious.
(I do think that with both Amazon's increasing dominance and seemingly increasing aggressiveness, they're heading for legal issues).
Sounds about right. But first they'd have to establish that Amazon has market dominance in the entire EU. Which I don't think they have. So there's that.
Then they would investigate if they abuse this dominance to stifle competition. Which I think your batteries example would qualify for. They'd probably look a bit further though because I dunno, if it's just batteries :-p So they'd gather more evidence and if they find enough, they too will get an antitrust case.
Just that, market dominance in itself is not illegal, so if Amazon, unlike Google (knowingly!!) did, uses that dominance responsibly, no problem.
What I got from the article, the investigation has been very reasonable and it's beyond doubt that Google went way over the line.
People may question whether this EU regulation is right (but I believe it is), but from the looks of it, at least it's fair: With great market dominance comes great responsibility.
In which case, quite possibly, if
* amazon can be argued to have a very large position, with the vast majority of searches going through it
* it can be shown that people tend to click almost exclusively on the first or first few links
* they are treating their own, different, service more favourably than competitors (and remember when in the context of google, it's how people would find the competitors in the first place)
* you can see them having hugely increased sales for their own product after the introduction, and massively decreased sales for other people
But then my understanding of the regulations comes largely from the links here.
Fundamentally though, if you're big enough to be concerned about this you should be able to afford the legal teams to figure this out or approach the commission to discuss what is and is not within the regulations.