GOP Senator Asks DOJ to Open a Criminal Investigation Into Amazon
April 29th, 2020Via: CNBC:
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is asking the Department of Justice to open a criminal investigation into Amazon, citing reports that he says suggest the company has used “predatory and exclusionary data practices to build and maintain a monopoly.”
Hawley’s request follows Friday’s Wall Street Journal report that said Amazon employees had used data from third-party sellers to rival them with private label products under Amazon’s own brands.
Amazon has previously testified to the House Antitrust Subcommittee that it only uses aggregated data from multiple third-party sellers to inform its product strategy, and did not look at sales data for individual products. But the Journal, after reviewing documents and interviewing more than 20 former employees, found that individual seller data could be easily deduced for some categories, making the distinction irrelevant in practice.
