Hawley Requests for a Criminal Antitrust Probe into Amazon

Sen. Josh Hawley is calling on federal prosecutors to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon. The Republican has urged the attorney general to make the move on Tuesday.

Hawley presses the Justice Department to open an investigation into Amazon’s data tactics.  A report outlined several instances in which Amazon employees peered into the sales data from independent sellers.

This was in order to develop its own competing, private label products.

Hawley wrote these practices are alarming for America’s small businesses even under ordinary circumstances. But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, he said. Predatory data practices threaten these businesses’ very existence, he added.

Amazon bars employees from using non-public, seller-specific data to determine which private label products to launch, its spokesperson responded.

Amazon Probe

After the report last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote statements seeking clarification. This was on whether a top Amazon official had “lied” to Congress about its data practices in a previous hearing.

Previously in July, Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel, said that the company does not use third-party data.

In the last few months, the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel has engaged in a probe. It was looking into possible anti-competitive behavior from big tech companies, including Amazon.

The committee was supposed to release its final report last month, however, the pandemic delayed the process.

Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim heads the antitrust division. After he recused himself from the Justice Department’s Google probe, Barr took greater control over investigations into the tech industry.

In July year,  the Justice Department opened a probe into large tech firms like Facebook, Amazon, and Google. This was to investigate broad concerns of anti-competitive behavior. A criminal probe into Amazon would be a step further for the department, and it could take years to finish.

Sen. Hawley’s Antitrust Enforcement on Big Tech Companies

Hawley is a Missouri Republican known for criticizing tech companies over issues like data privacy and antitrust. He has proposed to ban autoplaying videos and endless scrolling.

He has joined with Sen. Ed Markey and Richard Blumenthal for a letter probing the company’s teen data collection practices.

 He has penned legislation calling for social media platforms to prove that they are unbiased. Thus, this legislation with Democrats would extend more rigorous privacy protections for children.

He’s also been outspoken in calling for changes to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. They often see this as the central legal protection for online platforms.

Hawley has emerged as a surprising Republican voice on those antitrust issues. Moreover, the youngest working lawmaker in the Senate, Hawley has taken the lead on the ongoing investigations into Facebook.

The freshman senator said they’re trying to figure out what a property right in data actually looks like.

He further said that these companies are taking personal data, which is valuable information. They would think it belongs to the consumer, but that’s really the discussion. Who does the data belong to?

It’s time to start assigning the property rights and building up a legal regime around it, he suggested.

The senator said a lot of folks could agree that children are different from consenting adults. Every parent in America is concerned about the privacy of their children’s data.

Since the report last week, Amazon has opened an internal investigation looking into the matter. Any employees using third-party data to create private-label products would violate the company’s own policies, its spokesman said.