Amazon Files Legal Challenge to EU Digital Services Act

The EU went after Big Tech, and now Big Tech is starting to fight back. Today, Amazon filed a legal challenge to the EU Digital Services Act (DSA), which requires large online platforms to undergo increased regulatory scrutiny and abide by a stricter set of rules.

“Amazon doesn’t fit this description of a ‘Very Large Online Platform’ under the DSA and therefore should not be designated as such,” an Amazon statement explains of the suit. “If the VLOP designation were to be applied to Amazon and not to other large retailers across the EU, Amazon would be unfairly singled out and forced to meet onerous administrative obligations that don’t benefit EU consumers.”

Oops.

As it turns out, a large European online retailer called Zalando has, in fact, fallen under the umbrella of the DSA’s VLOP designation. And that company has also sued the EU because 64 percent of its business comes from retail sales, not online sales. One would think that Amazon would be aware of this.

Regardless, the DSA and its sister act, the Digital Markets Act, were very clearly designed to take on the abusive business practices of the top Big Tech firms—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—given that the language in this act so overtly ties directly to each. Each is, as the EU asserts, a “gatekeeper” to key online services, and each has the power to—and does—harm consumers and competition.

It will be interesting to see how this challenge fairs. While the U.S. twiddles its regulatory thumbs—the one key exception being the FTC’s failed attempt to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision Blizzard—the European Commission has always been aggressive from a regulatory standpoint but has really turned up the heat on Big Tech over the past year or so.