House panel calls Bezos to testify over Amazon allegedly misleading Congress

Jeff Bezos is asked to appear before the House Justice Committee that his company may have made misleading statements about its business practices. It’s a April 23 report that details how Amazon would act Use third-party data to develop and sell your own products.

The committee’s request sent in a letter on Fridaybuilds on his current study of “Amazon’s Role in the Digital Market”. While Bezos is expected to agree to appear, the group “reserves the right to use a mandatory process if necessary.”

According to the Wall Street Journal reportThe data collected by Amazon helped the company set prices, determine which features to integrate, and decide whether it was worth getting involved in a product category at all. The journal said it spoke to “more than 20 former employees of Amazon’s private label business” and reviewed documents detailing the practice.

Examples have reportedly included Amazon employees accessing data on a best-selling trunk organizer from a third party, including total sales and the amount Amazon made on each sale. The company’s private label business then introduced its own trunk organizers.

“If so, these claims contradict previous statements and written responses Amazon provided to the committee,” the House Justice Committee wrote in its letter to Bezos.

“For example, at our hearing on July 16, 2019, representative Pramila Jayapal asked about Amazon’s use of third-party seller data, and Amazon’s Nate Sutton, Associate General Counsel, replied, ‘We do not use seller data to compete with them.’ “

An Amazon representative denied the allegations in the journal report, but said the company “took”[s] these allegations very seriously “and has launched an internal investigation.

“We strictly prohibit employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch,” the representative said in a statement.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the House Committee’s Friday letter to Bezos.

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Dismissed Amazon employees accuse the company of retribution

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