By Jonathan Stempel<\/p>\n
Feb 24 (Reuters) – California asked a state judge on Tuesday to stop Amazon.com from inflating prices for consumers through an alleged campaign to \u200cbully merchants not to sell goods more cheaply elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The state’s attorney general, \u200cRob Bonta, sought a preliminary injunction in his 3-1\/2-year-old antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, which also seeks to recoup \u200bill-gotten profits.<\/p>\n
“Amazon\u2019s goal is to insulate itself from price competition by preventing lower retail prices in the market,” Bonta said in a heavily redacted filing in the California Superior Court in San Francisco. “Amazon tells vendors what prices it wants to see to maintain its own profitability.”<\/p>\n
Bonta \u200csaid his office has uncovered “countless” \u2060interactions where Seattle-based Amazon, rivals and merchants agreed to fix prices to ensure that Amazon would not be undercut on websites such \u2060as eBay, Target and Walmart.<\/p>\n
In a statement, Amazon said: “The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing \u200bits complaint \u200band based on supposedly \u2018new\u2019 evidence they have had \u200bfor years. Amazon looks forward to \u200cresponding in court.”<\/p>\n
Bonta said Amazon and rivals, with merchants acting as intermediaries, often agreed to raise prices or make products temporarily unavailable, eliminating any need for price-matching.<\/p>\n
Merchants that rejected Amazon’s demands would be cut off or denied access to its “Buy Box,” where shoppers can click “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now,” Bonta said.<\/p>\n
The Buy Box accounts for the vast majority \u200cof sales on Amazon’s website.<\/p>\n
“We welcome companies that \u200bsucceed by offering better prices and better service,” Bonta \u200bsaid in a statement. “What we have \u200bhere is a greedy, behemoth corporation intentionally increasing prices in the \u200cmarketplace to get richer and richer off \u200bthe backs of consumers.”<\/p>\n
The \u200bproposed injunction would stop Amazon’s alleged anticompetitive conduct while the case is pending, and a monitor would oversee Amazon’s compliance.<\/p>\n
Amazon has argued in court papers that \u200bits “procompetitive” agreements with merchants are \u200clegal, commonplace in the industry and benefit consumers through increased product selection, \u200bappropriate product stocking and competitive prices.<\/p>\n
A trial is scheduled for January 2027.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Jonathan \u200bStempel in New York;Editing by Nick Zieminski)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Jonathan Stempel Feb 24 (Reuters) – California asked a state judge on Tuesday to stop Amazon.com from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":192747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[8487,7,9,8,28006,3153,2794],"class_list":["post-192746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-amazon","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-california-superior-court","tag-preliminary-injunction","tag-rob-bonta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/192747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}