Case C-535/25, Amazon Italia Logistica – is a warehouse a post office?
Directive 97/67 was written for national post offices and their new competitors. The Consiglio di Stato asks whether it also covers a company that packs the parcel, runs the locker and instructs the courier without ever carrying anything itself.
Facts
By Decision No 400/18/CONS the Autorità per le Garanzie nelle Comunicazioni (AGCOM) found that three Amazon companies were providing postal services in Italy without the general authorisation required for them. Amazon Italia Logistica packs and labels items bought on the marketplace and assigns their final delivery to different carriers by area and deadline; Amazon Italia Services operates the locker network, monitoring deposit by local couriers and collection by customers; Amazon Italia Transport organises a delivery service performed by legally independent local operators working to Amazon’s detailed instructions. The Consiglio di Stato has referred one question in each of three cases — C‑535/25, C‑536/25 and C‑537/25 — identical but for the company: whether Articles 2 and 9 of the Directive preclude subjecting such activities to the postal authorisation regime. On 9 July 2026 the Advocate General delivered a single Opinion in the three cases (ECLI:EU:C:2026:574).
Questions Referred
Do Articles 2 and 9 of Directive 97/67 preclude national legislation which makes activities of the kind carried out by [Amazon Italia Logistica] and described in [AGCOM Decision No 400/18/CONS] subject to the authorisation regime laid down in respect of the provision of postal services to the public?
The questions in C‑536/25 (Amazon Italia Services) and C‑537/25 (Amazon Italia Transport) are in the same terms.
Sources
OJ notice C/2025/5676 (EUR‑Lex) · C‑536/25 (EUR‑Lex) · C‑537/25 (EUR‑Lex) · Case file on CURIA · Opinion of the Advocate General, 9 July 2026 (ECLI:EU:C:2026:574) · Directive 97/67/EC
Comment
Article 2(1) of the Directive defines postal services as “services involving the clearance, sorting, transport and delivery of postal items”, and Amazon’s position is a syllogism: none of the three companies performs any of those four operations, so none provides a postal service, so none needs an authorisation. What each does instead is organise, supervise or hand over — the work of a principal, not a carrier.
The Court has met the argument before. In Joined Cases C‑259/16 and C‑260/16, Confetra (ECLI:EU:C:2018:370) — also from Italy, also about AGCOM’s authorisation regime — it held that haulage, freight-forwarding and express undertakings whose services “involve” clearance, sorting, transport and distribution are postal service providers “except where their business is limited to the transport of postal items”. The judgment read the definition functionally: a service “involves” the postal operations if they are part of what it delivers to the customer, whoever performs them. Amazon’s three companies stand one step further back from the parcel than the freight forwarders in Confetra, and the question is whether that step takes them out.
The Advocate General’s answer, in the Opinion of 9 July, is that it does not. Articles 2 and 9, he proposes, do not preclude subjecting to the general authorisation regime an operator whose activities consist in allocating final delivery of pre-packed and labelled marketplace items to different carriers; in managing lockers, “including active supervision” of deposit by local couriers and collection by the addressee; and in organising a delivery service performed by legally independent local operators “who carry it out in accordance with the detailed instructions of the principal, which in reality holds the power of direction and control over those operators”. The reasoning treats locker management as part of “distribution” in the sense of Article 2(5), and treats direction and control of subcontracted couriers as providing the service they perform. The Opinion exists in French and Spanish only; the rendering here is this site’s.
If the Court follows, the consequence is not that Amazon must become a postal operator but that it must be authorised as one — which means being subject to the “essential requirements” the regime exists to secure, and, in Italy, to AGCOM’s supervision and levies. The wider principle is that a platform which designs and controls a delivery chain cannot avoid the regulation of that chain by contracting out its physical links. That principle has obvious application beyond parcels, and the Consiglio di Stato has asked the Court to state it in a case where the platform is the largest there is.