Epa
The inquiry will focus on the consumer electronics industry, clothing sector and creative industries.
The European Commission Wednesday launched its much-anticipated antitrust inquiry into Europe’s e-commerce sector.
Margethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for competition, will probe what barriers and bottlenecks make it difficult to buy and sell goods and services online from one member states to another.
The inquiry will focus in particular on the consumer electronics industry, clothing sector and creative industries.
“European citizens face too many barriers to accessing goods and services online across borders,” Vestager said. “Some of these barriers are put in place by companies themselves. With this sector inquiry my aim is to determine how widespread these barriers are and what effects they have on competition and consumers.”
The probe’s conclusions will feed into the Commission’s broader efforts to overhaul the laws affecting Europe’s digital sector.
“There is a need to see what is happening in the e-commerce sector,” said Else Groen, director general of the Independent Retail Group. “It is important to align the positions of national competition authorities on e-commerce – more alignment would be better.”
The preliminary conclusions are expected in mid-2016 and the final report in early 2017.
But Vestager made clear that she will pursue any examples of anti-competitive conduct identified by the probe.
“If they are anti-competitive we will not hesitate to take enforcement action under EU antitrust rules,” she said.
That could spell several years of upheaval for manufacturers, wholesalers and e-commerce retailers, who are the likely targets of the inquiry.
Previous sector inquiries conducted by the Commission have been described as intrusive by companies, who said that answering the Commission’s questions drained time and resources.
The pharmaceutical sector inquiry led to heavy fines for some pharmaceutical firms, some coming as long as six years after the inquiry was completed.
This article was updated to add a reaction from the independent retail association.
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