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 demands” 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 Trade Commission has been investigating the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime beginning in March 2021 with the issuance of civil subpoenas, the largest on-line retailer and tech large disclosed in a petition to the company filed earlier this month.

The petition asks the FTC to cancel, or prolong the deadline for answering, subpoenas despatched final June to Bezos, Amazon’s former CEO, and present CEO Andy Jassy. It says the FTC “has identified no legitimate reason for needing their testimony when it can obtain the same information, and more, from other witnesses and documents.”

Jassy took excessive place at Amazon from Bezos, one of many world’s richest people, in July 2021. Bezos grew to become govt chairman.

The FTC investigation has widened to incorporate at the very least 5 different subscription programmes, based on Amazon: Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited, Subscribe & Save, and an unidentified third-party programme not provided by Amazon. The regulators are asking the corporate to determine the variety of customers who have been enrolled within the programmes with out giving their consent, amongst different buyer info. In June, company employees sought to serve subpoenas on almost 20 present and former Amazon workers, at their houses, with dates for them to present testimony in coming weeks, the petition says.

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

Amazon blames the standoff on “unexplained pressure placed on staff to complete the investigation hastily, 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 information, for the Seattle-based firm, which runs an e-commerce empire and ventures in cloud computing, private “good” tech and beyond. Amazon Prime costs $139 (roughly Rs. 11,000) a year. The service added a coveted feature this year by obtaining exclusive video rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Night Football.”

Last year, Amazon asked unsuccessfully that FTC Chair Lina Khan step aside from separate antitrust investigations into its business, contending that her public criticism of the company’s market power before she joined the government makes it impossible for her to be impartial. Khan was a fierce critic of tech giants Facebook (now Meta), Google and Apple, as well as Amazon. She arrived on the antitrust scene in 2017, writing an influential study titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” when she was a Yale law student.

Amazon’s latest petition to the FTC was first reported Monday by Business Insider.