Amazon and EU reach agreement to try to level the playing field for third-party sellers

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Amazon and European Union regulators have reached an agreement over two long-running antitrust cases, the European Commission has announced, which it's hoped will help make third-party sellers more competitive on Amazon's marketplace. The agreement means Amazon will avoid fines that had the potential to stretch into the billions of dollars, but it has agreed to make a series of legally binding commitments that it will have to abide by for up to seven years.

The commitments come in three broad parts that are consistent with those that were made public in July this year. First, Amazon has agreed not to use nonpublic data from independent sellers on its Marketplace platform to make decisions like which products to launch or what prices to...

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