US lawmakers give Amazon until November to prove it didn't lie to Congress
US House representatives say they are ready to call upon the Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon executives, including ex-CEO Jeff Bezos, lied to Congress about whether the internet giant unfairly uses customer data to create and market its own products.
Employees in India were accused of keeping tabs on which products sold by third-party vendors proved to be popular among buyers, and then developing competing Amazon-branded versions. Amazon then rigged its product search results to unfairly promote its own products and crush competition on its Indian website, judging from internal documents.
Those files, obtained by Reuters, go against previous statements and testimonials Amazon executives and founder Bezos gave a House Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust. In a hearing in July 2020, the billionaire space tourist said Amazon’s own policy “prohibits the use of anonymized data, if related to a single seller, when making decisions to launch private brand products.”
Amazon’s Associate General Counsel Nate Sutton in a hearing a year earlier said: “We do not use any seller data for – to compete with them.” He also said Amazon did not “use any of that specific seller data in creating our own private brand products,” and it does not manipulate search rankings to boost these rival goods.
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