Amazon has complained to federal regulators that they’re hounding firm founder Jeff Bezos and senior executives, making “impossible-to-satisfy calls for” of their investigation of Amazon Prime, the favored streaming and buying service with free supply and an estimated 200 million members across the globe.
The Federal Commerce Fee has been investigating the sign-up and cancellation practices of Amazon Prime beginning in March 2021 with the issuance of civil subpoenas, the retail and tech big disclosed in a petition to the company filed earlier this month.
The petition asks the FTC to cancel, or prolong the deadline for answering, subpoenas despatched final June to Bezos, Amazon’s former CEO, and present CEO Andy Jassy. It says the FTC “has recognized no official purpose for needing their testimony when it will possibly acquire the identical data, and extra, from different witnesses and paperwork.”
The investigation has widened to incorporate at the very least 5 different subscription applications, in accordance with Amazon: Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Limitless, Subscribe & Save, and an unidentified third-party program not provided by Amazon. The regulators are asking the corporate to determine the variety of customers who had been enrolled within the applications with out giving their consent, amongst different buyer data. In June, company employees sought to serve subpoenas on practically 20 present and former Amazon workers, at their houses, with dates for them to provide testimony in coming weeks, the petition says.
Amazon says within the petition it has labored “diligently and cooperatively” with FTC employees for greater than a 12 months to supply data related to the probe, providing up some 37,000 pages of paperwork. It calls the knowledge demanded within the subpoenas “overly broad and burdensome.”
Amazon blames the standoff on “unexplained stress positioned on employees to finish the investigation unexpectedly, by an arbitrarily chosen deadline.”
FTC spokespeople didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
With an estimated 150 million U.S. subscribers, Amazon Prime is a key income, in addition to a wealth of buyer information, for the Seattle-based firm. It prices $139 a 12 months. The service added a coveted characteristic this 12 months by acquiring unique video rights to the NFL’s “Thursday Evening Soccer.”
Final 12 months, Amazon requested unsuccessfully that FTC Chair Lina Khan step except for separate antitrust investigations into its enterprise, contending that her previous public criticism of the corporate’s market energy makes it inconceivable for her to be neutral.
Amazon’s newest petition to the FTC was first reported Tuesday by The Wall Road Journal.
