Powerful House committee demands Jeff Bezos testify after ‘misleading’ statements
Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices.
In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from the Wall Street Journal. Specifically, the letter addressed Amazon’s apparent practice of diving into its trove of data on products and third-party sellers to come up with its own Amazon-branded competing products.
As the Journal notes, Amazon “has long asserted, including to Congress, that when it makes and sells its own products, it doesn’t use information it collects from the site’s individual third-party sellers—data those sellers view as proprietary.”
In documents and interviews with many former employees, the Journal found that Amazon does indeed consult that information when making decisions about pricing, product features and the kinds of products with the most potential to make the company money.
In the letter, the House Judiciary Committee accuses Bezos of making “misleading, and possibly criminally false or perjurious” statements to the committee when asked about the practice in the past.
“It is vital to the Committee, as part of its critical work investigating and understanding competition issues in the digital market, that Amazon respond to these and other critical questions concerning competition issues in digital markets,” the committee wrote, adding that it would subpoena the tech CEO if necessary.
While the coronavirus crisis has taken some of the heat off of tech’s mounting regulatory worries in the U.S., the committee’s actions make it clear that plenty of lawmakers are still interested in taking tech companies to task, even with so many aspects of life still up in the air.
Amazon is in hot water with a powerful congressional committee interested in the company’s potentially anticompetitive business practices. In a bipartisan letter sent Friday to Jeff Bezos, the House Judiciary committee demanded that the Amazon CEO explain discrepancies between his own prior statements and recent reporting from the Wall Street…
Recent Posts
- The best deal from Amazon’s Big Spring Sale is a free 65-inch 4K TV from Samsung
- 1200TB SSD modules are in the pipeline thanks to Pure Storage — but you definitely won’t be able to plug one in your workstation PC and it will be shockingly expensive
- The iPhone 16 could come with extra RAM and storage – just for AI
- ‘Spirited Away’ returns to theaters in April for Studio Ghibli Fest 2024
- Where to preorder Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree (and what’s included)
Archives
- March 2024
- February 2024
- January 2024
- December 2023
- November 2023
- October 2023
- September 2023
- August 2023
- July 2023
- June 2023
- May 2023
- April 2023
- March 2023
- February 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- November 2022
- October 2022
- September 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- June 2022
- May 2022
- April 2022
- March 2022
- February 2022
- January 2022
- December 2021
- November 2021
- October 2021
- September 2021
- August 2021
- July 2021
- June 2021
- May 2021
- April 2021
- March 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- December 2020
- November 2020
- October 2020
- September 2020
- August 2020
- July 2020
- June 2020
- May 2020
- April 2020
- March 2020
- February 2020
- January 2020
- December 2019
- November 2019
- December 2011