Amazon.com, Inc. (AMZN) And Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) To Be Investigated For Restrictive Pan-Europe E-Commerce

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) the US-based e-commerce giant and Netflix Inc. (NASDAQ:NFLX) the high-quality video-streaming company will now be investigated by European Commission. In an announcement on Thursday, regulatory body indicated that its investigations would detect policies of both the e-commerce players, which restrict buying or selling of goods/services.

With more services across the European continent being subjected to ‘geo-blocking,’ EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager believes that these need to be removed to create the greater European vision of Digital Single Market.

The inquiry will focus on identifying barriers that exist within the e-commerce spectrum in Europe, vis-à-vis the e-commerce players terms of service. The aim is to ensure that the barriers are ‘tackled’ so that the benefits of e-commerce reaches citizens as well as businesses of the European continent the Competition Commissioner added.

Earlier on Wednesday, the European Commission had announced the road map to create a Digital Single Market.

The EC announced that it will approach the creation of such as market with a two-step strategy which will see the European companies become competitive with US Technology companies.

In the first phase the Commission will investigate the common set of rules about cellular communications, privacy as well as digital content and most importantly shipping goods as well as across the borders.

In the second phase, the regulatory scrutiny of technology giants would begin with respect to anti-trust allegations, basic legality as well as privacy issues.

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) as Netflix are in the line-up of companies being investigated for deals on movies as well as content as well as the content which can be viewed by the location of the viewer.

Competitive Commissioner held forth, that the need is to remove the loss of benefits to e-commerce consumers due to geo-blocking, a fact which is not possible with offline services in Europe.