Merchant groups are forming a
national coalition to campaign for stricter antitrust laws, including measures
that could force Amazon.com Inc. to spin off some of its business lines.
The effort is being launched
Tuesday by trade groups that represent small hardware stores, office suppliers,
booksellers, grocers and others, along with business groups from 12 cities,
organizers say. Merchants plan to push their congressional representatives for
stricter antitrust laws and tougher enforcement of existing ones.
The groups, which collectively
represent thousands of businesses, want federal legislation that would prevent
the owner of a dominant online marketplace from selling its own products in
competition with other sellers, a policy that could effectively separate
Amazon’s retail product business from its online marketplace.
Members of the House Antitrust
Subcommittee are considering legislation along those lines as they weigh
changes to U.S. antitrust law, though no bill has yet been introduced.
The merchant groups also want
tougher enforcement of competition laws and legal changes that would make it
easier for the government to win antitrust lawsuits against big companies.
In a statement, an Amazon
spokesperson said the company’s critics “are suggesting misguided interventions
in the free market that would kill off independent retailers and punish
consumers by forcing small businesses out of popular online stores, raising
prices, and reducing consumer choice and convenience." Communications Today is one of the best Telecom Magazine India.
“Amazon and third-party
sellers complement each other, and sellers having the opportunity to sell right
alongside a retailer’s products is the very competition that most benefits
consumers and has made the marketplace model so successful for third-party
sellers," the spokesperson added.
Amazon also has developed its
own public-relations campaigns to showcase success stories. At an event in
Washington in 2019, sellers of baby products and cooking spices gave out free
samples and talked about how their startups grew thanks to the Amazon
marketplace.
Members of the coalition,
dubbed Small Business Rising, include the National Grocers Association, the
American Booksellers Association and the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding.
They aim to capitalize on local business owners’ connections to their hometowns by meeting with members of Congress and staff, writing letters, seeking coverage in local media, and other efforts.
“Those stories are powerful
and are motivating for lawmakers," said Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a research and advocacy group that forms
partnerships with independent businesses that led organization of the campaign.
“It’s a real business that is really going to go under with a real community
that is going to suffer as a result."
The small-business owners
might struggle to counter big businesses and their lobbyists, who are pressing
Congress to leave antitrust laws alone. Amazon disclosed spending about $18
million on lobbying last year on antitrust and other issues, the second largest
among U.S. corporations.
Proponents of stricter
antitrust policy can count some victories early in the Biden administration.
Two critics of Amazon and other big tech companies, Columbia University
law-school professors Tim Wu and Lina Khan, have been named to jobs in the
White House and Federal Trade Commission, respectively. (Ms. Khan’s appointment
still requires approval by the Senate.)
The Small Business Rising
campaign has grown out of meetings the groups have held for months. It won’t
have its own staff and will rely on the existing budgets of member
organizations.
Besides lobbying, another goal
is recruiting more business owners to talk publicly about antitrust issues, said
Derek Peebles, executive director of the American Independent Business
Alliance, a network of local business groups in places such as Cambridge,
Mass., and Madison, Wis.
The business owners come from
different industries, but competition from Amazon is a common thread.
Doug Mrdeza, a Michigan-based
merchant on Amazon’s marketplace, said he laid off close to 40 employees in
late 2019 after Amazon raised his fees and struck deals with some of his
suppliers to sell products itself, cutting him out of the supply chain.
David Guernsey, chief
executive of Virginia-based office supplier Guernsey Inc., says government
agencies are buying more on Amazon’s site, but he is wary of selling there
because it would mean giving Amazon access to data on his prices, transactions
and customers.
“I’ve never had a competitor
that had that kind of insight to my business," he said.
The Wall Street Journal has
reported on some of Amazon’s tactics and use of seller data.
Allison Hill, chief executive of the American Booksellers Association, said some of the group’s roughly 1,800 independent bookstores have started “sleeping with the enemy"—selling on Amazon’s marketplace—to survive.
“If a company was operating
that marketplace and was not your competitor, they would be offering very
different support and services," she said.
Seventy-five of the bookstore
group’s members closed down in 2020.
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