It would be the first time that Jeff Bezos appears before Congress.
Washington:
Amazon.com Inc said on Monday that its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, was ready to testify before a Congressional panel investigating potential breaches of US antitrust law by big tech companies.
The company confirmed a letter that its lawyer had sent to members of the House judicial committee saying that Amazon had cooperated with the investigation. “This includes making Jeff Bezos available to testify at a hearing with other CEOs this summer,” said Robert Kelner’s letter from Covington and Burling LLP.
The four major technology platforms – Google, Apple Inc, Amazon and Facebook Inc of Alphabet Inc – are under investigation by a committee of the House Judiciary Committee and the United States Department of Justice. The Federal Trade Commission probes Facebook and Amazon and groups of attorneys general in the United States are examining Facebook and Google.
Kelner said in the letter that Amazon and the committee should “resolve a number of issues regarding the timing, format and problems of producing outstanding documents, all of which must be framed by the extraordinary demands of the global pandemic.”
It would be the first time Bezos has appeared before Congress, a source close to the company said.
In early May, the committee wrote to the CEO of Amazon.com to request his testimony following a report that the online retailer uses data from its third-party sellers to create competing products. Amazon’s deputy general counsel, Nate Sutton, denied under oath last July that Amazon had used sensitive information from its independent vendors to develop Amazon products.
In addition, the letter also noted that Amazon had provided the committee’s antitrust panel with over 225,000 pages of documents and noted that the committee had not given a “binding commitment” to confidentiality.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
