Amazon has complained to federal regulators that they are pursuing "impossible-to-satisfy demands" from company founder Jeff Bezos and senior executives as part of their investigation into Amazon Prime, the well-known streaming and shopping service with free worldwide shipping that has an estimated 200 million subscribers.
The largest online retailer and tech giant revealed in a petition to the agency filed earlier this month that the Federal Trade Commission has been looking into the sign-up and cancellation procedures of Amazon Prime since March 2021.
The petition requests that the FTC dismiss or postpone the deadline for Bezos, the former CEO of Amazon, and Andy Jassy, the current CEO, subpoenas that were issued in June. When it can get the same information—and more—from other witnesses and documents, the FTC, according to the statement, "has discovered no justifiable basis for obtaining their testimony."
In July 2021, Jassy succeeded Bezos as CEO of Amazon, one of the wealthiest people in the world. As executive chairman, Bezos.
According to Amazon, the FTC inquiry has expanded to at least five more subscription services, including Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited, Subscribe & Save, and an unnamed third-party service that is not provided by Amazon. Along with other client data, the regulators are requesting from the corporation information about the number of customers who were registered in the programmes without their consent. According to the petition, agency personnel attempted to serve subpoenas on roughly 20 current and former Amazon workers in June, notifying them of dates when they would be required to provide testimony.
Amazon claims in the petition that for more than a year it has cooperated "diligently" with FTC officials to provide material important to the investigation, offering up about 37,000 pages of records. It describes the subpoenaed information as "overly broad and onerous."
The impasse is attributed by Amazon to "unexplained pressure put on staff to finish the study quickly, by an arbitrary determined deadline."
Tuesday's request for comment wasn't immediately answered by FTC spokespersons.
With an estimated 150 million US subscribers, Amazon Prime is a significant source of income for the Seattle-based business, which also dabbles in cloud computing, personal "smart" technology, and other areas. It also provides a plethora of customer data. A year of Amazon Prime costs $139, or around Rs. 11,000. With the acquisition of the exclusive video rights to the NFL's "Thursday Night Football," the service introduced a highly desired feature this year.
Amazon attempted to have FTC Chair Lina Khan recuse herself from several antitrust investigations into its business last year, claiming that her prior public criticism of the company's market dominance before joining the government rendered her impartiality impossible. Khan was a staunch opponent of tech behemoths Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook (now Meta). When she was a Yale law student, she first entered the antitrust world in 2017, with the influential paper "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox."
Business Insider was the first to break the news about Amazon's most recent FTC petition on Monday.
