Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Senator Pushes DOJ to Open Criminal Investigation Into Amazon

Senator Pushes DOJ to Open Criminal Investigation Into Amazon



The Amazon online commerce portal uses data from the companies they sell on the platform to create and launch their own products, contrary to the company's support, according to the Wall Street Journal. The research, which was based on interviews with 20 former employees and internal Amazon documents, found that the firm uses data on sales, marketing costs, and shipping products that other manufacturers sell through the platform for their own products. The company's internal policy prohibits its employees from using non-public data to make decisions regarding their own products, so in the journal, s.a. Amazon said it has opened "internal research." This disclosure highlights Amazon's dual nature as an e-commerce platform open to third parties and as a manufacturer of its own products, which are also sold on the online portal and therefore engage in direct competition with those of other sellers. Thus, the company is both the "boss" of the market and one of the shopkeepers, raising constant suspicions of monopolistic practices and having caused multiple regulators in both Europe and the US to open investigations against it for alleged violations of free competition.
As the king of e-commerce, Amazon is living through times of tremendous growth in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent orders to confine and close physical shops, although in turn it has been placed in the public eye for not providing enough security measures to its workers and for abusing their market dominance.


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