Amazon Says CEO Bezos Willing to Testify Before US Congress

The company's attorney sent a letter to members of the House Judiciary Committee, saying Amazon had cooperated with the probe.

By Reuters | Updated: 16 June 2020 10:07 IST

Amazon Says CEO Bezos Willing to Testify Before US Congress

The US is investigating potential violations of US antitrust law by big tech companies

Highlights

The Federal Trade Commission is probing Facebook and Amazon
US state attorneys general are looking at Facebook and Google
This would be the first time that Bezos has appeared before Congress

Amazon said on Monday its founder and Chief Executive Jeff Bezos was willing to testify to a congressional panel investigating potential violations of US antitrust law by big technology companies.

The company's attorney sent a letter to members of the House Judiciary Committee, saying Amazon had cooperated with the probe. "This includes making Jeff Bezos available to testify at a hearing with the other CEOs this summer," said the letter from Robert Kelner of Covington and Burling LLP.

The big four tech platforms - Alphabet's Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook - are under investigation by a House Judiciary Committee panel and the US Justice Department. The Federal Trade Commission is probing Facebook and Amazon and US state attorneys general are looking at Facebook and Google.

Representative David Cicilline, chair of the committee's antitrust panel, said testimony from the CEOs was "essential to complete this bipartisan investigation into the state of competition in the digital marketplace."

"The Antitrust Subcommittee will continue to use the tools at our disposal to ensure we gather whatever information is necessary," he said in a statement.

Kelner's letter said that Amazon and the committee would need to "resolve a number of questions regarding timing, format, and outstanding document production issues, all necessarily framed by the extraordinary demands of the global pandemic."

This would be the first time that Bezos has appeared before Congress, according to a source familiar with the company.

In early May, the committee demanded Bezos' testimony in the wake of a report that the online retailer uses data from third-party sellers to create competing products. Amazon's associate general counsel, Nate Sutton, had denied under oath last July that Amazon used sensitive information from independent sellers to develop Amazon products.

The letter also noted that Amazon had given the committee's antitrust panel more than 225,000 pages of documents and notes that the committee has not given a "binding commitment" that they would be confidential.

© Thomson Reuters 2020

Is Mi Notebook 14 series the best affordable laptop range for India? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS, download the episode, or just hit the play button below.

Comments

For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube.