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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, however, will come face-to-face with lawmakers looking to challenge his company’s developing influence at Wednesday’s antitrust hearing.
The hearing before the House antitrust subcommittee, which will be conducted via video conference due to the coronavirus pandemic, will provide legislators with a rare opportunity to directly question Amazon’s CEO about amazon’s market strength and business practices, as well as other existing issues, such as its solution. warehouse workers the pandemic.
Apple CEOs, Google and Facebook, which will also appear Wednesday, have already tried to make openings with politicians who have questioned their company’s strength or policies, either to appear on the hill or, in the case of Apple CEO Tim. Cook.Array locates a non-unusual floor with President Trump.
But Amazon has more frequently highlighted other top executives at previous antitrust hearings with lawmakers, allowing Bezos to stay largely out of the fray. Dave Clark, Amazon’s senior vice president of retail operations, Jeff Wilke, executive director of Amazon’s customer business, and Jay Carney, Amazon’s most sensible spokesman and former press secretary to President Barack Obama, exchanged beards with the company’s critics in press and Twitter interviews.
Meanwhile, President Trump, angry at critical reports in the Bezos-owned Washington Post, has criticized the company, accusing it of everything from local tax evasion to unfair use of the U.S. Postal Service. The dispute peaked again in January, when Amazon filed a formal complaint opposed to the Department of Defense’s resolution to grant Microsoft a $10 billion cloud computing contract. Amazon Web Services chief Andy Jassy told CNBC’s Jon Fortt at the time: “When an existing president is willing to make it clear that he doesn’t like a company and the CEO of that company, the government’s job is complicated. agencies, adding the DoD. make objective resolutions without worrying about retaliation.”
Wednesday’s hearing will mark Bezos’ first appearance in Congress. But it has been expanding its presence in the country’s capital for years.
After buying the Post in 2013, Bezos bought a $23 million mansion in the Kalorama community of DC. Within a few years, Amazon chose the National Landing community in the suburbs of Washington, Arlington, Virginia, as the location of its current headquarters, HQ2. Amazon remains one of the leading lobbyists among generation corporations and has developed its public policy team in recent years.
Wednesday’s hearing will most likely draw new attention to antitrust laws on Amazon, but others familiar with the company’s business practices remain skeptical about whether lawmakers will ask the right questions.
Amazon faces investigations by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and general state lawyers, as well as antitrust tariffs imaginable in the EU for its repair of third-party vendors, the Wall Street Journal reported in June.
Amazon appointments with third-party resellers have a primary topic of surveys. These distributors sell their products in the Amazon marketplace, which accounts for more than part of the company’s annual revenue, and some have complained about inconsistent policies and unclear corporate communication over the years.
A WSJ report prior to this year found that Amazon workers had unaggregated or easily identifiable knowledge from third-party distributors to create their own competing products, and the house’s antitrust subcommittee suggested amazon get answers about the knowledge it collects from transactions from third-party vendors. , which workers have access to the KnowledgeArray transaction and how it determines who wins each sale and at what price.
The report’s findings gave the impression of contradicting the testimony of Amazon’s general suggestion, Nate Sutton, at a hearing in July 2019. Sutton said Amazon was not a third-party seller to help expand its personal label products, but that it was looking for aggregate knowledge. Merchants.
House Antitrust Subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline said the report raised suspicions that Amazon had lied to the committee. The committee then asked Bezos to testify to deal with the problem.
Jason Boyce, a former Amazon salesman who is now a representative of outside merchants, says he has experienced first-hand some of the methods regulators are considering lately. Boyce said he began questioning whether knowledge about Amazon’s third-party distributors being reviewed through other groups as early as 2007 was based on data he had obtained from meetings with Amazon executives. About a decade later, his considerations have become less public when Amazon introduced a brand-name bowling game that seemed strangely similar to his own, up to the “unique color palette” designed through the Boyce brand.
It is not unusual for grocery retailers and retail hotel branches to expand their own brands and advertise them to customers. In addition, Amazon says its personal label products account for about 1% of its sales.
Boyce said Bezos would reach the audience ready with statistics like those that need to be verified to minimize the importance of Amazon’s personally branded products on the platform, as well as fears of a preferential remedy about third-party products in the pursuit of ratings and advertising.
“Bezos will stick to the popular Amazon party line,” Boyce said. “They like to focus on the numerator than on the denominator, depending on their position or what they do in the market.”
The more complex problems affecting external distributors are likely to go unnoticed at Wednesday’s hearing, given the time constraints and the fact that lawmakers may not have the experience to perceive all the nuances of some of the technologies used in the market, Boyce said. For example, he said lawmakers might not ask questions about the alters andities that force Amazon’s “shopping box,” which gives consumers a one-click button to upload an indexed product to or buy a product. This is a vital sales engine, however, not all third-party merchants are eligible to get the box in their ads.
James Thomson, former director of Amazon and now a spouse of Buy Box Experts, said Amazon’s personal label business was an “easy target” for lawmakers, but that other issues, such as Amazon’s use of visitors’ knowledge to target ads, are. also considered.
Thomson said classified ads targeted on Amazon have led it to look like a “virtual grocery store, where you only see the aisles where you bought products.” It admitted that it is not transparent if this access to detailed visitor knowledge gives Amazon a credit to other distributors in the market.
However, he said, “It would be attractive to know more about what Amazon’s proprietary marketing is that it materializes itself but offers no more, in terms of space, access to knowledge, email campaigns, unpaid advertising placement.”
Melissa Burdick, a 10-year-old Amazon veteran who now runs an Amazon ad purchase generation provider, reiterated that researchers deserve not Amazon’s advertising practices. “Amazon has become a paid platform because the game has to appear on the first results search page,” he added.
The company’s antitrust subcommittee asked Amazon last October about the inclusion of classified classified ads on the site, asking if its algorithms favor third-party merchants who have purchased classified classified ads and other services, whether your corporate personal brand will pay for sponsored classified ads, and whether it creates an advertising area about the box to sell to third parties.
In its responses, Amazon stated that it does not reserve ad space for personal brands, adding that this “depends on many variables”, such as what the buyers and device they are browsing for.
“Manufacturers will never publicly say they are angry with Amazon, however, when Amazon suggests a personal label product as a less expensive product, I think those are the problems,” Burdick said. “I think it’s about what’s right and then build consistent, standardized regulations around that.”
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