Enlarge / We like to imagine Attorney General Barr is telling Hawley, "Just hold that thought, maybe." (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)
Amazon is already facing a bevy of antitrust probes, both in the United States and overseas. Just about every state, federal, and international regulator with any kind of competition regulation power is investigating the company over some aspect of its business. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), however, wants to add one more to the pile and is calling on the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe.
"Recent reports suggest that Amazon has engaged in predatory and exclusionary data practices to build and maintain a monopoly," Hawley wrote today in a letter (PDF) to Attorney General William Barr. "These practices are alarming for America's small businesses under ordinary circumstances. But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses' very existence."
The recent report to which Hawley refers is last week's Wall Street Journal exposé, which found that Amazon employees accessed third-party merchants' data as a matter of habit in order to launch their own in-house products and undercut the marketplace vendors who rely on Amazon as a platform.
Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
No comments:
Post a Comment