(Reuters) — Amazon acknowledged on Monday its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos modified into as soon as willing to testify to a congressional panel investigating probably violations of U.S. antitrust regulation by gargantuan skills firms. The corporate’s prison reliable despatched a letter to participants of the House Judiciary Committee, asserting Amazon had cooperated with the probe. “This involves making Jeff Bezos on hand to testify at a listening to with the numerous CEOs this summer season,” acknowledged the letter from Robert Kelner of Covington and Burling LLP.
The gargantuan four tech platforms — Alphabet’s Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook — are below investigation by a House Judiciary Committee panel and the U.S. Justice Department. The Federal Trade Commission is probing Facebook and Amazon, and U.S. direct attorneys frequent are having a scrutinize at Facebook and Google. Representative David Cicilline, chair of the committee’s antitrust panel, acknowledged testimony from the CEOs modified into as soon as “important to cease this bipartisan investigation into the direct of opponents within the digital marketplace.”
“The Antitrust Subcommittee will continue to reveal the tools at our disposal to make move we select in spite of recordsdata is serious,” he acknowledged in an announcement.
Kelner’s letter acknowledged that Amazon and the committee would must “resolve a choice of questions relating to timing, structure, and outstanding doc production factors, all primarily framed by the phenomenal calls for of the area pandemic.”
This is in a position to possibly be the principle time that Bezos has regarded forward of Congress, per a provide conscious of the company.
In early Could well well most probably, the committee demanded Bezos’ testimony within the wake of a file that the procure retailer uses recordsdata from third-event sellers to provide competing merchandise. Amazon’s affiliate frequent counsel, Nate Sutton, had denied below oath final July that Amazon feeble peaceable recordsdata from independent sellers to invent Amazon merchandise.
The letter additionally notes that Amazon had given the committee’s antitrust panel better than 225,000 pages of documents and that the committee has no longer given a “binding commitment” that they would possibly be confidential.