This is really just a way to tax their 3rd party vendors, having cloned 10,000s of their products already to compete with them.<p>Now Amazon will either get the sale from dominating results with their massive in-house product range, or the 3rd party vendor has to buy the sale back via advertising.<p>They are being investigated in Europe because of the likelihood they are selecting which products to clone based on the 3rd party vendors' sales data.<p><a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/eu-regulators-want-to-know-if-merchants-hurt-by-amazon-copies-idUSKCN1M82IU" rel="nofollow">https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-amazon-com-antitrust/e...</a><p>They probably copy online services too, so you can imagine how much growth opportunity they can measure hosted on AWS by 3rd party developers.<p>When you think about the risks of building on a platform like Twitter who might copy your work if you're popular, with Amazon you can see this scaling from software on AWS all the way to whatever fraction of a penny profit is in shower curtain hooks.<p><a href="https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partner_products/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...</a>