Amazon’s planned $2.5 billion takeover of Roomba maker iRobot is facing regulatory scrutiny from all angles.

The European Commission has set a provisional deadline of July 6 to decide whether to open an investigation into the acquisition.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority will decide by June 16 whether it will open an in-depth probe, while the FTC in the US is already investigating the deal.

The current FTC chair Lina Khan wrote a 2017 article, ‘Amazon’s antitrust paradox’, for the Yale Law Review, which argued strongly against Amazon’s monopolistic tendencies.

Amazon said it is “working cooperatively with the relevant regulators in their review of this merger.”

In Australia, the ACCC is currently investigating the deal, while Digital Rights Watch, a not-for-profit advocacy group, has also lobbied for the deal to be blocked, saying the acquisition isn’t about selling robot vacuums.

“This is so Amazon can gather even more information about our lives and our homes,” said James Clark, executive director of Digital Rights Watch when the deal was first announced.

“At its core, Amazon is a surveillance company,” Clark wrote in a report.

“Amazon protects its market power and profitability by using its scale to build detailed profiles on millions of people and uses that to predict market trends and manipulate user behaviour.

“The personal information about Australians and their homes shouldn’t be treated as an asset to be traded and acquired. This is sensitive and private information. There needs to be real limits on how it can be used, and especially on how it can be shared.”

UK tech watchdog Foxglove Legal voiced “grave concerns that the proposed merger is yet another example of Amazon’s habit of ‘snuffing out’ innovative entry and broader competition in existing and emerging markets” to the CMA.

“Amazon already spies on our doorsteps and listens in on our dinner conversations – hoovering up iRobot would put Amazon inside our living rooms,” the group said.