The U.Okay.’s Competitors and Markets Authority (CMA) has confirmed that it’s assessing Amazon’s proposed acquisition of robotic vacuum maker iRobot.

The case remains to be at its earliest attainable stage, the place the CMA is basically soliciting feedback from related stakeholders to ascertain whether or not there could also be a “substantial lessening of competitors” within the U.Okay. on account of Amazon shopping for iRobot.

The CMA hasn’t supplied any particular timescales or deadlines for when it can announce whether or not to proceed with an official investigation.

Good residence

Based some 30 years in the past out of the Massachusetts Institute of Expertise (MIT), iRobot might be finest recognized for its Roomba-branded autonomous vacuum cleaners, although it additionally affords tangential merchandise capable of mopping floors.

With Amazon’s gradual foray into the smart home, in addition to its own dabblings in home robotics together with integrations with Roombas, it wasn’t essentially an enormous shock that iRobot can be a tempting proposition for Amazon, which tabled a $1.7 billion for publicly-traded iRobot in August.  However against a backdrop of rising regulatory scrutiny in opposition to Huge Tech, it was little shock that the megabucks iRobot deal would finally draw the attentions of authorities across the globe.

Throughout the water in mainland Europe, EU regulators are reportedly preparing to research Amazon’s iRobot acquisition on privateness grounds, as a result of issues over how Amazon may mix knowledge from the 2 corporations to achieve a aggressive benefit. In its home market, in the meantime, Amazon is already in the regulators’ crosshairs as a part of a multi-faceted investigation masking acquisitions, competitors, privateness and extra. The Federal Commerce Fee (FTC) is at the moment mulling an official investigation into its iRobot deal, although notably the FTC did recently greenlight Amazon’s $3.9 billion One Medical acquisition.

As for the U.Okay., it at the moment has a bunch of antitrust offers to take care of. Simply yesterday, regulator Ofcom revealed that it was preparing to refer the native cloud infrastructure marketplace for an in-depth investigation, with Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft particularly in-focus. Microsoft’s bumper $68.7 billion bid for Activision is also in the CMA’s line-of-sight, as is Broadcom’s planned $61 billion VMware acquisition. And a few 18 months in the past, the CMA ordered Facebook parent Meta to sell-off Giphy, which it had bought the previous year for $400 million.

So whereas at present’s information doesn’t essentially imply that Amazon’s iRobot deal is in peril, it’s clear that the U.K. has an appetite for interrogating Huge Tech’s M&A endeavors. And with EU and U.S. regulators additionally eyeing up a possible in-depth investigation, it might not be overly shocking if the U.Okay. did determine to launch an official inquiry.

TechCrunch has reached out to Amazon for remark, and can replace right here after we hear again.