Congress calls on Bezos to come explain Amazon’s possible lies

Enlarge / Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos and his surprised face speaking in 2019. (credit: Eric Baradat | AFP | Getty Images)

A bipartisan group of House representatives wants Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to show up and explain to their socially distanced faces why media reports say his company is doing something Amazon previously promised Congress it would never do.

The House Antitrust subcommittee opened its investigation into "abusive conduct" in the tech sector-focusing on Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Apple, and Facebook-last June, almost a year ago. So far the committee has held several public hearings and has gone through untold reams of documentation it requested from all four firms about several of their business practices.

Among the practices under examination is Amazon's treatment of third-party vendors on its massive marketplace platform and its use of data generated by those merchants to compete against them directly with first-party private label sales. Company representatives explicitly told Congress several times in the past year that Amazon does not access vendors' data in that way or for those purposes.

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