Canada’s competition regulator has suffered a fresh courtroom defeat in its ongoing effort to investigate Amazon’s handling of fraudulent product reviews, after the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed its appeal and affirmed that the e-commerce giant does not have to hand over the sweeping dataset the watchdog had been seeking for nearly two years.
The newly issued appellate decision is the latest setback for the Competition Commissioner, who has been pursuing transaction data from Amazon since June 2024 as part of a broader investigation into whether the company allows fake or misleading reviews to persist on its marketplace. Specifically, the commissioner sought records covering sales of health, personal care, home, and electronic products categories that together span an almost incomprehensibly vast swath of the platform’s inventory.
From the moment the data request was filed, Amazon pushed back hard. The company argued that the scope of what the commissioner wanted was not just ambitious it was unreasonably broad, excessive, and practically burdensome to comply with. With billions of products listed across the targeted categories, Amazon maintained that fulfilling the request as written would be an enormous undertaking with no clearly proportionate benefit to justify it.
The initial federal court that heard the matter conceded that Amazon likely possessed the information in question. However, it found that the commissioner had not adequately explained or justified why data of that magnitude across those specific categories was necessary for the investigation. Without a clearer rationale tethering the scope of the request to the actual goals of the probe, the court declined to compel disclosure and ruled in Amazon’s favour.
The Competition Commissioner took the case to the Federal Court of Appeal, arguing that the lower court had erred and that the data was essential to advancing the investigation. The appeal was heard last year, but the appellate judges were not persuaded. Their decision, now made public, dismisses the commissioner’s case without granting the relief sought.
The ruling is a significant blow to the watchdog’s ability to build its case against the online retail giant. Without access to the transaction-level data it was pursuing, the commissioner’s investigation into Amazon’s marketing practices and its alleged tolerance of fake reviews faces a much steeper climb if it continues at all.
The case touches on questions that regulators around the world are wrestling with: how to obtain meaningful data from digital platforms operating at massive scale, and how to craft investigative demands that satisfy courts demanding proportionality. Amazon’s successful resistance to the request underscores just how high the bar can be for competition authorities when seeking information from companies whose data footprint is measured in the billions of transactions.
The Competition Commissioner has not publicly indicated whether it intends to pursue the matter further either by refiling a narrower data request or exploring alternative avenues. For now, Amazon’s platform data stays squarely in Amazon’s hands, and Canada’s fake review investigation remains stalled at a critical juncture.
