Amazon accused of misleading US Congress over business practices
Executives including Jeff Bezos may have lied under oath when denying allegations that Amazon illegally favours its own products
Amazon executives, including former CEO Jeff Bezos, have been accused by five members of the US Congress of misleading a congressional investigation into the company's business practices, and possibly lying under oath.
The five lawmakers, all members of the bipartisan House Judiciary Committee, wrote to Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy on Sunday, asking the company to provide further evidence to support the sworn testimony supplied to Congress by a number of the firm's executives to the Committee's antitrust subcommittee in an investigation in 2019 and 2020 into whether the company used of data from third-party sellers to favour its own products in search rankings.
Amazon executives denied allegations that it tuned its algorithms to promote its products and those of favoured suppliers above those of third-party retailers using the platform.
As reported by Reuters, stories in that outlet and elsewhere led the lawmakers to believe the testimony supplied by the Amazon executives was flawed.
"At best, this reporting confirms that Amazon's representatives misled the Committee. At worst, it demonstrates that they may have lied to Congress in possible violation of federal criminal law," the letter said.
The letter gives Jassy up to 01 November to provide supply evidence to support the executives' statements about how the company uses third-party data.
A Reuters report published last week, based on internal documents from 2112 to 2019, alleged that "Amazon employees studied proprietary data about other brands on Amazon.in, including detailed information about customer returns. The aim: to identify and target goods - described as 'reference' or 'benchmark' products - and 'replicate' them.
An Amazon spokesman said the company has "denied and sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question".
A previous Reuters report published in February, also based on internal documents from Amazon India, found that Amazon favours big sellers on its Indian platform and has given them preferential treatment for years. It accused the firm of manoeuvring around the foreign direct investment (FDI) rules established by the Indian government to protect India's small traders from being crushed by e-commerce giants.
At the time, Amazon described Reuters story as "unsubstantiated", "incomplete" and "factually incorrect".
The investigation comes as US lawmakers show signs of getting tough with big tech with calls for companies like Facebook and Amazon to be broken up. In India, the accusations add will fuel to a long-running campaign by small retailers for laws to reduce the power of global online suppliers, an issue in which the Indian government has so far shown little interest.