Connecticut is investigating Amazon’s digital book business for anticompetitive behavior

Authors: Nandita Bose and Arundhati Sarkar

(Reuters) – Connecticut is investigating Amazon.com Inc for potential anticompetitive behavior in its digital book business, the state’s attorney general said on Wednesday.

The probe is one of many concerning the e-commerce platform’s business practices. Amazon is also being investigated by the attorneys general of New York, California and Washington, as well as the Federal Trade Commission.

“Connecticut is conducting an active and ongoing antitrust investigation into Amazon for potentially anticompetitive terms in its e-book distribution agreements with certain publishers,” Attorney General William Tong said in a statement to Reuters.

The poll comes as tech platforms face a backlash in the United States and around the world amid concerns from regulators, lawmakers and consumer groups that the companies have too much power and are harming users and business rivals.

Tong said his office has already taken action against companies such as Apple Inc and many e-book publishers to protect competition in this market and will continue to aggressively monitor it.

An Amazon spokeswoman declined to comment.

Amazon has a dominant share of the e-book market, with rivals including Barnes & Noble, Apple and Alphabet’s Google.

A scathing antitrust report by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel in October detailed Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior and suggested barring the company from operating an online marketplace where it also competes. Amazon opposed the report before its publication, arguing that market interventions “would kill independent retailers and punish consumers by pushing small businesses out of popular online stores, raising prices and limiting consumer choice.”

Amazon’s online marketplace is coming under increasing scrutiny for how it treats sellers, collects data from such sellers and markets competing products.

In 2012, the US Department of Justice in an antitrust lawsuit accused Apple and five major publishers of working together to raise the prices of digital books. The publishers settled, but Apple went to trial and lost.

(Reporting by Arundhati Sarkar in Bengaluru and Nandita Bose in Washington; Editing by Sherry Jacob-Phillips and Leslie Adler)