The Federal Court of Appeal has officially blocked Canada’s competition watchdog from accessing a massive collection of Amazon’s internal data, marking a major setback for an investigation into whether the company allows alleged fake reviews to mislead shoppers.
In a decision released on Monday, March 30, the court dismissed an appeal filed by the Competition Bureau last year, reports The Canadian Press. This legal battle centred on a request for detailed transaction information regarding millions of products in categories like health, electronics, and home goods.
While the court acknowledged that Amazon likely possesses the data the government is looking for, it ruled in the company’s favour because the Commissioner of Competition failed to properly justify such a massive and broad request.
Amazon successfully argued that handing over data for billions of products would be an excessive and unnecessarily burdensome task. The judges agreed that the watchdog did not provide a strong enough legal reason to demand such a wide net of information, essentially concluding that the request was overreaching.
This dispute is part of a much larger, multi-year investigation into whether Amazon’s use of customer ratings and Amazon’s Choice badges results in deceptive marketing.
The Competition Bureau is specifically trying to determine if incentivized or fraudulent reviews are being used to trick algorithms into ranking certain products higher than they deserve. This probe gained significant momentum in June 2024 when the Bureau first obtained court orders to look into how these reviews might distort what Canadian shoppers see.
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Proving once again that big mega corporations get whatever they want.