Amazon criticizes FTC probe into Prime membership practices

Amazon is solely outraged.

Since 2021, the tech big has been the topic of a Federal Commerce Fee investigation into its Prime membership subscription practices, with a concentrate on whether or not the corporate’s person interface may unfairly trick folks into opting into the service. 

The formal investigation wasn’t confirmed till this week, when the company made a legal filing by the corporate public. However one thing else was revealed together with it: how unfair Amazon thinks the entire affair is.

The submitting argues at size that founder Jeff Bezos and present CEO Andy Jassy simply don’t want to take a seat for an interview with the company. 

“Jeffrey Bezos and Andrew Jassy additional petition to quash their Particular person CIDs [Civil Investigative Demand by the FTC] as a result of workers has recognized no authentic cause for needing their testimony when it might probably get hold of the identical data, and extra, from different witnesses and paperwork,” reads the submitting, dated August 5.

The submitting is a uncommon burst into public view of months of battle between Amazon and FTC chair Lina Khan, who took over as commissioner in 2021. The 33-year-old Khan made a reputation for herself and her school of “hipster antitrust” theory which contended that main corporations, particularly Amazon, have an excessive amount of energy over markets. Khan is breaking with many years of antitrust follow when decrease costs had been the primary normal adopted by the FTC.

The work that put her on the map was printed within the Yale Legislation Assessment in 2017. It’s title: “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”

Amazon bemoans ‘egregious’ conduct

Amazon additionally calls out the FTC’s “egregious” determination to forestall the corporate and its particular person executives from retaining the identical authorized counsel.

Insider previously reported on the probe in addition to the truth that the corporate has thought of a number of fixes however executives shelved them on account of decrease subscription progress, citing unreported inside paperwork and present and former staff..

Why aren’t Bezos and Jassy wanted?  Amazon’s authorized counsel says that not solely has the corporate produced about 37,000 pages of paperwork, labored with the FTC to reply its questions, and adopted up with the company to make sure it was assembly its calls for, however it might probably proceed to provide paperwork and supply different staff to reply company queries.

A number of the egregious conduct highlighted by Amazon: the corporate’s authorized counsel says there was a four-month hole in communication from the FTC, ending in April of this 12 months, when the company introduced {that a} new legal professional was taking up the investigation. The FTC then initiated one other CID in June that Amazon’s counsel says each “expanded” and “accelerated” the investigation, whereas concurrently imposing a tough deadline for its completion that was fully “arbitrary.” 

“Employees’s dealing with of this investigation has been uncommon and perplexing,” reads the submitting, referring to the FTC.

The FTC didn’t reply to Fortune’s request for remark, whereas Amazon referred Fortune to its authorized submitting.

As for what comes subsequent, the summary of Khan’s 2017 article could present some clues. “[T]he firm has positioned itself on the middle of e-commerce and now serves as important infrastructure for a bunch of different companies that depend on it … We can’t cognize the potential harms to competitors posed by Amazon’s dominance if we measure competitors primarily by value and output. Particularly, present doctrine underappreciates the chance of predatory pricing and the way integration throughout distinct enterprise strains could show anticompetitive. These considerations are heightened within the context of on-line platforms.”