The Dutch Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) announced on August 3, 2026 that bol.com, the country's largest online retailer, has offered binding commitments to stop favoring its own products over those of third-party sellers in search results and product listings. The draft decision is open for public consultation through September 13, 2026, after which ACM can formalize the commitments. Notably, ACM states plainly that its investigation, opened February 14, 2024, "did not establish any violation of laws or regulations." Bol reshaped how its marketplace works anyway.
What Bol Agreed To Change
The commitments, detailed by ACM, cover four areas: bol will adjust how it determines which offers consumers see first, so its own products no longer appear more prominently than competing sellers' listings; it will not use data collected from the platform to give its own retail arm a competitive edge; it will speed up complaint handling and communication with commercial sellers; and it will clarify price displays for shoppers. Bol's own account of the deal, published on its corporate site, adds specifics: an improved Buy Box mechanism, more data and analytics shared with selling partners, and equal access to bol's "Select Deals" promotional program for third-party sellers. Chief Legal Officer Jorn Palm framed it as a clarity exercise: "Millions of customers and thousands of selling partners choose bol every day. That means it must be clear to everyone how our platform works and which rules apply."
The stakes are real. Bol is the dominant online retailer in the Netherlands and Belgium, with an estimated €5.17 billion in gross merchandise value — more than Albert Heijn, Coolblue, and AliExpress combined generate in the Dutch market. It occupies the same structural position that triggered antitrust scrutiny of Amazon in the US and EU: a marketplace operator that also competes as a first-party seller on its own platform, with the ability to set the rules of the shelf it stocks.
The Case For Intervention
The self-preferencing concern is not manufactured. When a platform simultaneously runs the marketplace and sells its own goods on it, the temptation to tilt the Buy Box or search ranking toward its own listings is structural, not incidental — the pattern is well documented from prior European scrutiny of Amazon's use of independent-seller data to advantage its own private-label products, alongside parallel Buy Box remedies. Dutch sellers who depend on bol for the bulk of their online sales have limited outside options in a market where bol alone accounts for a large share of e-commerce activity; if the platform's own products get systematic pole position, competition on the merits erodes quietly, sale by sale, with no single moment a court could point to as "the violation." ACM's insistence on data-use limits and Buy Box transparency addresses exactly that slow-erosion problem, and doing so via commitments rather than litigation gets remedies in place years faster than a contested infringement case would.
Why the Commitments Route Deserves Scrutiny, Too
But the same feature that makes a commitments settlement fast is what should make observers cautious: ACM got sweeping behavioral changes — to ranking algorithms, data governance, and promotional access — from a company it explicitly did not find broke any law. That is not necessarily improper; commitment procedures exist in Dutch and EU competition law precisely so firms can resolve regulatory concern without a costly, multi-year infringement fight, and bol's cooperative posture throughout suggests it saw more upside in settling than litigating. Still, a regime where the practical cost of triggering a two-and-a-half-year investigation is a mandated rewrite of your ranking algorithm — regardless of whether you did anything unlawful — creates real incentive for platforms to over-comply with regulator preferences pre-emptively, rather than compete aggressively and defend that competition later if challenged. That trade-off is worth naming, not waving away.
A National Tool Reaching Where the DMA Doesn't
The deal is also notable for what legal instrument is absent: the EU's Digital Markets Act, which regulates self-preferencing and data use for designated "gatekeeper" platforms, does not apply here — bol falls well short of the DMA's steep revenue and EU-wide user thresholds required for that designation. ACM reached a materially similar outcome using ordinary Dutch competition-law commitment powers against a company that is large domestically but modest by pan-European gatekeeper standards. That is the more durable story here: national regulators don't need Brussels-level thresholds to extract Amazon-style platform-fairness remedies from a dominant local marketplace. Other EU member-state authorities watching a mid-sized national champion operate a dual marketplace role now have a concrete template — investigation, negotiated commitments, public consultation, binding decision — that doesn't require DMA gatekeeper status to deploy. Whether that template stays proportionate, evidence-driven, and limited to platforms with genuine market power, or expands informally to any company a regulator would simply prefer behaved differently, is the question worth watching once the consultation window closes on September 13.