Скачать или смотреть Bezos dodges questions at first Congress hearing

(29 Jul 2020) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos dodged tough questions from about evidence the online retailer stifled competition and raised prices on certain products during a House Judiciary hearing on antitrust trust laws Wednesday, July 29.
Bezoz and other executives of big technology platforms like Apple, Facebook and Google, were grilled for their companies' practices spelled out in more than a million internal documents unearthed during yearlong investigation of market dominance in the industry.
Bezos initially declined to testify unless he could appear with the other CEOs.
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal pressed the CEO over a Wall Street Journal report that found Amazon employees used confidential data collected from sellers on its online marketplace to develop competing products.
"You have access to data that your competitors do not have," Rep. Jayapal said. "So you might allow third party sellers onto your platform, but if you're continuously monitoring the data to make sure that they're never going to get big enough that they can compete with you. That is actually the concern that the committee has."
During the hearing Bezos admitted Amazon does have a policy against using seller specific data to aid the company's private label business, but failed to recall whether or not the policy has ever been violated.
"the fact that we have such a policy is voluntary. I think no other retailer even has such a policy," Bezos said. "Our enforcement of that policy. We would treat that like any internal policy. And if we found that someone violated it, we would take action against them."
Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, presented slides during the hearing that detailed plot hatched in email conversations between Amazon employees back in 2010 to outcompete the baby care product website diapers.com by temporarily slashing the price of diapers sold on Amazon.
"We saw one of your profit and loss statements, and it appears that in one month alone, Amazon was willing to bleed over 200 million dollars in diaper profit losses," Rep. Scanlon said. "Mr. Bezos, how much money was Amazon ultimately willing to lose on this campaign to undermine diapers.com?"
Instead of a direct answer, Bezos stated that too much time had passed for him to recall the specifics behind the precieved predatory pricing campaign.
"I cannot comment on that because I don't remember it. What I can tell you is that we are very, very focused on the customer as you (stated)," Bezos said.
During the course of the hearing, lawmakers cut off the answers of the big tech leaders in an effort to summarize their findings from the investigation.
Rep. Scanlon expressed her worries that the dominate control Amazon has over online diaper sales could be hurting families in need of baby products during the coronavirus pandemic.
"So it certainly is something that has a really hard impact on families. And I'm really concerned that pricing might have been driven up here by this tactic," Rep Scanlon said.

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