Amazon used a secret algorithm that helped the company raise prices on other online sites and “destroyed” some internal communications as the Federal Trade Commission was investigating the company, according to new portions of the agency's antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Via ABC News:
The new excerpts unveiled Thursday allege Amazon executives intentionally deleted communication by using a feature on the popular app Signal that makes messages disappear. By doing this, the FTC said Amazon “destroyed more than two years” worth of communications from June 2019 to “at least early 2022” despite instructions it gave Amazon not to do so.
In a prepared statement Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle called the FTC’s claim “baseless and irresponsible.” “Amazon voluntarily disclosed employee Signal use to the FTC, painstakingly collected Signal conversations from its employees’ phones, and allowed agency staff to inspect those conversations even when they had nothing to do with the FTC’s investigation,” Doyle said.
The FTC and 17 states sued Amazon in September alleging the company was abusing its position in the marketplace to inflate prices on and off its platform, overcharge sellers and stifle competition. Amazon is accused of violating federal and state antitrust laws, but the company has responded with a full-throated defense of its business practices.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Via NBC News:
Amazon flooded its search results with irrelevant “defect” ads at the direction of Founder Jeff Bezos, pumping Amazon profits while steering shoppers to higher-priced goods, the Federal Trade Commission alleged in a newly unredacted portion of its antitrust lawsuit against the company.
“At a key meeting, Mr. Bezos directed his executives to ‘[a]ccept more defects’ as a way to increase the total number of advertisements shown and drive up Amazon’s advertising profits,” the FTC wrote in a now-public part of the complaint. The agency said that defect ads referred to those that that are irrelevant or only somewhat relevant to what a user is searching for.
And there was this, via Reuters:
(Reuters) - Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) punished its own sellers to limit Walmart's reach as Walmart got into e-commerce, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
In addition to making $1 billion by using a secret algorithm called "Project Nessie" to push up the prices that U.S. households pay, Amazon may have also succeeded in curbing Walmart's ambitions.
In 2014, the arrival of Jet.com triggered fear at Amazon that Jet.com would be able to offer shoppers lower prices online, the FTC said on Thursday, kick-starting Amazon's strategy of removing sellers’ offers from the Buy Box if shoppers could find the same products at lower prices on Jet.com. The Buy Box is the button that allows shoppers to make a purchase directly from a seller.
