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In response to: Italy's competition authority slapped a €1.13 billion fine on Amazon for abusing its dominant position in the market and harming competitors in the e-commerce logistics service.

The Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) said on Thursday that Amazon was giving sellers using its logistics service, called “Fulfillment by Amazon,” advantages in terms of visibility and sales, including access to its “Prime” label. Amazon said it "strongly" disagrees with the AGCM's decision and will appeal.

The large fine comes amid increased antitrust scrutiny of Big Tech worldwide. The European Commission has opened an investigation similar to the Italian one that focuses on the rest of the EU.

“Amazon holds a position of absolute dominance in the Italian market for intermediation services on marketplaces, which has allowed it to favor its own logistics service,” the Italian regulator said in a statement, adding that Amazon’s conduct was “particularly serious.”

The AGCM also imposed behavioral measures, including ordering Amazon to set “fair and non-discriminatory standards” for third-party sellers to get advantages in terms of sales and visibility. A monitoring trustee will review these measures.

The watchdog launched its probe in 2019 over concerns that Amazon was giving sellers using its logistics service a better chance to appear as Amazon’s pick for users searching a product featured in a separate section of its website, the “buy box.” This is a pop-up window that shows customers additional products when they proceed with a purchase.

In response to: What is going on in Germany? Even for a militant pro-vaxxer – I’m proud to be such – the idea of a general population-wide “mandatory” vaccination makes one uneasy.

I can well understand why it is being introduced in Germany, and Greece and Austria for that matter, because of their depressingly low coverage; but I do fear how far they’ll take the policy – and if it will actually have the desired effect.

Even in an emergency, you have to hold on to a sense of what will work. It is about drawing a line. At one end, it seems more than reasonable to require people working in health and care settings to be vaccinated, because it may reduce infection and transmission (to a degree), as it adds to a localised herd immunity effect, and of course the national one.

It’s also fair to ask those entering crowded indoor venues, including bars, theatres and restaurants, to produce evidence of Covid status, such as a documented negative test, and a vaccine certificate: a so-called vaccine passport. No one has a human right to get down at the disco. Germany seems to be extending that to “non-essential shops”, which is pushing it, but with some justification. Reducing contacts reduces infections, after all. At this point in the argument, it is sometimes still asserted that Covid is no worse than the flu and we have to “learn live with it”.

Maybe omicron will prove relatively benign, if more contagious, but we don’t know yet. We need to be cautious because by the time we find out it isn’t nicer than the delta variant, it’ll be too late. Hence the “panic”, which is simply the precautionary principle at work, albeit belatedly.

I’d say the last 20 months have suggested that Covid can be rather worse for more people than flu. It is endemic, but that doesn’t mean it can be ignored. It’s also pointed out that vaccination doesn’t stop anyone catching Covid – or passing it on. That’s only partly correct. The unvaccinated are disproportionately represented on the Covid wards. Vaccines reduce the incidence of the disease – which is why death rates remain lower than in the pre-vaccine period.

According to a recent report, fully vaccinated people can contract and pass on Covid-19 in the home – but at lower rates than unvaccinated people (which comes froma study of Covid-19 transmission between household contacts, led by Imperial College London and the UK Health Security Agency (HSA) and published inThe Lancet Infectious Diseases). On that same basis, there’s a case for requiring people who work in other settings where they come into closer contact with large numbers of people – say, in schools, hospitality or public transport – to also be vaccinated as a condition of employment (with medical exemptions).

Of course, individuals should also be required to wear masks, because they too help to reduce transmission. As with vaccines, the masks are not 100 per cent effective – far from it – but they add to our collective defences, and this is confirmed in another recent UKHSA survey of the evidence, which concludes that: “Overall, the evidence suggests that all face coverings are, to some extent, effective in reducing transmission of SARS-CoV-2 in both healthcare and community settings.”

So, every little helps, and that includes vaccination. In that context, in extreme conditions, it might be reasonable to ask parents to agree to vaccination for older children, provided it is safe to do so – special caution is needed.

It’s true that kids rarely suffer much from Covid, but the older adults they meet certainly do. The evidence in this pandemic of social and educational harm inflicted by sending pupils home from school is also real – so this should really be a very last resort in a pandemic spike and a collapsing NHS. Yet if it saves lives, then it would have to be enforced, as lockdowns have been over these past months.