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 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 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 turned govt chairman.

The FTC investigation has widened to incorporate at the least 5 different subscription programmes, in response to 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 shoppers who had been enrolled within the programmes with out giving their consent, amongst different buyer info. In June, company workers sought to serve subpoenas on practically 20 present and former Amazon workers, 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 12 months to supply 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 “smart” 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 12 months, 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 Facebook (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 legislation pupil.

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