LONDON, Oct 18 Reuters - Five members of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee wrote to Amazon.com Inc's chief executive Sunday and accused the company's top executives, including founding Jeff Bezos, of either misleading Congress or possibly lying to it about Amazon's business practices.
The letter also states that the committee is considering whether a reference of this matter to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation is appropriate. The letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy followed a Reuters investigation https: www.reuters.org/examples com investigated special report Amazon-India rigging this week which showed that the company had conducted a systematic campaign of copying products and rigging search results in India to boost sales of its own brands - practices Amazon denied engaging in. Bezos succeeded Jassy, a longtime Amazon executive in July.
The letter states that the credible reporting in the Reuters story and recent articles in several other news outlets directly contradicts the sworn testimony and representations of Amazon Top Executives including ex-CEO Jeffrey Bezos. 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 https: bit.ly 3 BXwIc7 demonstrates an apparent but deceptive breach of the terms of the federal criminal law.
In response, an Amazon spokesperson issued a statement that said: Amazon and its executives did not mislead the committee and we have denied and sought to correct the record on the inaccurate media articles in question. It added: As previously stated, we have an internal policy, which goes beyond that of any other retailer's policy that we're aware of, that prohibit the use of individual seller data to develop Amazon private label products. We investigate any allegations that this policy is violated and take appropriate action. Since 2019, the House Judiciary Committee has been investigating competition in digital markets, including how Amazon is using proprietary data from its platform to process Amazon products, and whether the company unfairly favors itself.
In testimony before the Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee last year, Bezos said the company prohibits its employees from using data on private sellers to benefit its own individual product lines. In another hearing in 2019, Nate Sutton, Amazon's associate general counsel, testified that the company does not use such data to create its own branded products or alter its search results to benefit them.
In the 2019 congressional hearing whether Amazon alters algorithms to direct consumers to its own goods, Sutton replied: The algorithms are optimized to predict what customers want to buy regardless of the seller. The lawmakers letter gives Jassy a final chance to provide evidence to corroborate the company's prior testimony and statements. It also notes that it is knowingly and willfully illegal to make statements which are materially false, conceal a material fact or otherwise provide false documentation in response to a congressional investigation. It gives the CEO until Nov. 1 to provide a sworn response to clarify how Amazon uses non-public individual seller data to develop and market its own line of products and how Amazon's search rankings favor those products.
It also requests copies of all documents mentioned in the Oct. 13 Reuters investigation.
We strongly urge you to make use of this opportunity to correct the record and provide the Committee with accurate, sworn, and unaccompanied answers to this request as we consider whether a referral of this matter is appropriate to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, the letter states.
The Reuters probe was based on thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents, including emails, strategy papers and business plans. They showed that, at least in India, Amazon had a formal, clandestine policy of manipulating search results to favor Amazon's own products as well as copying other seller's goods, and that at least two senior company executives reviewed it.
Amazon said in response to the Reuters report, We believe these claims are factually inaccurate and unsubstantiated. The company did not elaborate. The company said the way it displays search results doesn't favor private-brand products.
The lawmakers' letter also cites other recent stories in the Markup, the Wall Street Journal and Capitol Forum about Amazon's private products and use of seller data.
The letter's sharp wording ratchets up Washington and Big Tech rhetoric. Among companies including Amazon, Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc. have been under high scrutiny in Washington, Europe and other parts of the world, fueled by concerns among regulators, lawmakers and consumer groups that the firms have too much power and are engaging in unfair practices that hurt other businesses.
The lawmakers' letter was signed by a bipartisan group and included the judiciary committee’s chairman, Democrat Jerrold Nadler, and four members of the antitrust subcommittee’s chair, Republican Ken Buck and Matt Gaetz.
On Wednesday, the Reuters investigation called for the Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren to make a statement about Amazon. In India, a group representing millions of brick and mortar retailers urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government to take action against Amazon.