Amazon Claims FTC Probe of Prime Service Hounding Jeff Bezos, Others

Amazon has complained to federal regulators that they’re hounding firm founder Jeff Bezos and senior executives, making “impossible-to-satisfy calls for” of their investigation of Amazon Prime, the favored streaming and purchasing service with free supply and an estimated 200 million members across the globe.

The Federal Commerce Fee has been investigating the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime beginning in March 2021 with the issuance of civil subpoenas, the most important on-line retailer and tech big disclosed in a petition to the company filed earlier this month.

The petition asks the FTC to cancel, or lengthen the deadline for answering, subpoenas despatched final June to Bezos, Amazon’s former CEO, and present CEO Andy Jassy. It says the FTC “has recognized no official motive for needing their testimony when it might receive the identical data, and extra, from different witnesses and paperwork.”

Jassy took excessive place at Amazon from Bezos, one of many world’s richest people, in July 2021. Bezos turned government chairman.

The FTC investigation has widened to incorporate a minimum of 5 different subscription programmes, in line with Amazon: Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Limitless, Subscribe & Save, and an unidentified third-party programme not supplied by Amazon. The regulators are asking the corporate to establish the variety of shoppers who had been enrolled within the programmes with out giving their consent, amongst different buyer data. In June, company workers sought to serve subpoenas on almost 20 present and former Amazon staff, at their properties, with dates for them to offer testimony in coming weeks, the petition says.

Amazon says within the petition it has labored “diligently and cooperatively” with FTC workers for greater than a yr to offer data related to the probe, providing up some 37,000 pages of paperwork. It calls the data demanded within the subpoenas “overly broad and burdensome.”

Amazon blames the standoff on “unexplained stress positioned on workers to finish the investigation swiftly, by an arbitrarily chosen deadline.”

FTC spokespeople did not instantly reply to a request for remark Tuesday.

With an estimated 150 million US subscribers, Amazon Prime is a key income, in addition to a wealth of buyer knowledge, for the Seattle-based firm, which runs an e-commerce empire and ventures in cloud computing, private “sensible” tech and past. Amazon Prime prices $139 (roughly Rs. 11,000) a yr. The service added a coveted characteristic this yr by acquiring unique video rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Evening Soccer.”

Final yr, Amazon requested unsuccessfully that FTC Chair Lina Khan step apart from separate antitrust investigations into its enterprise, contending that her public criticism of the corporate’s market energy earlier than she joined the federal government makes it unattainable for her to be neutral. Khan was a fierce critic of tech giants Fb (now Meta), Google and Apple, in addition to Amazon. She arrived on the antitrust scene in 2017, writing an influential examine titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” when she was a Yale regulation pupil.

Amazon’s newest petition to the FTC was first reported Monday by Enterprise Insider.