FTC says Bezos, Jassy must testify in probe of Amazon Prime
Washington, D.C. Federal authorities have rejected the company's claim that the executives are being unduly harassed in the examination of the well-known streaming and shopping program and have ordered Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and CEO Andy Jassy to appear in the government's investigation into Amazon Prime.
Late on Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission denied Amazon's plea to quash civil subpoenas sent in June to Bezos, the former CEO of the Seattle-based business, and Jassy. The decision also stipulates that Bezos, Jassy, and 15 other top executives who were also subpoenaed must finish all of their testimony by January 20.
In July 2021, Bezos, one of the richest people in the world, handed over control of the online retail and technology company to Jassy. As executive chairman, Bezos.
According to the ruling signed by FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson on behalf of the commission, Amazon has not demonstrated that the subpoenas "create excessive difficulties in terms of breadth or timing." The FTC did agree to change several subpoena provisions, though, that it conceded seemed to be overly broad.
Since March 2021, the FTC has been looking into how Amazon Prime, which has an estimated 200 million subscribers worldwide, signs people up and cancels their memberships.
The business stated that it was glad that the FTC "walked away its widest requests" in the subpoenas, but it was disappointed but not surprising that the agency mostly supported its own viewpoint.
Amazon released a statement saying, "Amazon has cooperated with the FTC throughout the inquiry and has already supplied tens of thousands of pages of documentation." Although we remain worried that the most recent demands are excessively broad and onerous, we are dedicated to working constructively with the FTC staff and will consider all of our alternatives.
The business objected to the subpoenas issued to Bezos and Jassy in a petition to the FTC sent last month, claiming that the agency "has articulated no reasonable justification for seeking their testimony when it can acquire the same information, and more, from other witnesses and documents." Amazon claimed that the FTC was harassing Bezos, Jassy, and the other executives and criticized the subpoenaed documents' information requests as being "overly broad and onerous."
A minimum of four more Amazon-owned subscription services, including Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited, and Subscribe & Save, as well as an undisclosed third-party service that is not provided by Amazon are now included in the probe. In addition to other client data, the regulators have asked the corporation to specify the number of customers who were registered in the programs without their consent.
The corporation, which operates an e-commerce empire and dabbles in cloud computing, personal "smart" technology, and other areas, relies heavily on Amazon Prime, which has an estimated 150 million U.S. users and provides a lot of consumer data. A year of Amazon Prime costs $139. With the acquisition of the exclusive video rights to the NFL's "Thursday Night Football," the service introduced a highly desired feature this year.
Amazon attempted to have FTC Chair Lina Khan recuse herself from several antitrust investigations into its business last year, claiming that her prior public criticism of the company's market dominance before joining the government rendered her impartiality impossible. Khan was a staunch opponent of tech behemoths Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta). When she was a Yale law student, she first entered the antitrust world in 2017, with the significant paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox."
