In 2021, Amazon registered 470 billion US dollars.
In 2022, Amazon’s brand value hit a record $705.65 billion.
The company reported 200 million paid Prime members worldwide in 2020.
Investigations around the world against large technology companies continue to be in the public eye. Amazon recently claimed that federal investigators have mounted a campaign to “harass” top executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, as part of a US investigation into alleged antitrust violations by the e-commerce giant that suffered a mysterious six-month “breakdown” several months ago.
Amazon is the most important company in the e-commerce industry, where according to information shared in its annual report, Amazon’s net revenue and service sales recorded US$470 billion, up from US$386 billion in 2020.
Likewise, Amazon is one of the American companies that has registered success throughout the world and with that it has a large number of collaborators on its staff. The company founded by Jeff Bezos became an employment machine during the Covid-19 pandemic, registering, according to results published by the company itself, 500,000 new jobs in worldwide in 2020, with another 170,000 added in the first nine months of 2021.
Antitrust investigation against Amazon
Amazon claimed that federal investigators have mounted a campaign to “harass” top executives, including founder Jeff Bezos, as part of an investigation into alleged antitrust violations by the e-commerce giant that suffered a mysterious six-month “breakdown” several months ago.
The Seattle-based company alleges that the Federal Trade Commission is issuing subpoenas for Bezos, current CEO Andy Jassy, and nearly two dozen other former and current employees and executives who are “unduly burdensome and calculated to have no purpose other than to harass Amazon’s most senior executives and disrupt their business operations.”
Amazon’s legal filing also alleges that there was a “failed” unexplained in the FTC investigation that began late last year, alleging that agency investigators went silent for six months after providing more than 37,000 pages of documents.
“While Amazon continued to produce responsive materials, FTC staff inexplicably went offline,” company attorneys allege.
After nearly half a year of silence, Amazon said FTC officials, led by FTC Chair Lina Kahn, 33, who Amazon said should refrain from any investigation of the company due to her public criticism prior to Big Tech, “they abruptly notified” the company in April that a “new lawyer would take over” and that “the staff was under “tremendous pressure” to conclude the investigation”.
FTC investigators said they had a “deadline” to complete the investigation, but “despite the stated urgency,” “staff members had not reviewed…half of the materials previously produced by Amazon,” According to the document.
Amazon said it was then asked to produce even more material in a matter of weeks, but the company “pointed out the infeasibility of the new unreasonable and inflexible demands on staff.”
Other prominent Amazon executives who have been subpoenaed as part of the investigation include former retail chief Dave Clark and his successor, Doug Herrington.
Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of international operations, and the company’s former Prime division vice president, Greg Greeley, have also been implicated in the investigation, according to the document.
Amazon says government agents served the summonses to the people in question at their homes just before the July 4 holiday weekend.
Likewise, Amazon demands that the federal agency “void or limit” subpoenas due to “impracticable and unfair” procedures that it believes are a “unilateral effort to force Amazon to meet impossible demands.”
“Staff handling of this investigation has been unusual and puzzling,” Amazon says in its filing.
The FTC wants Amazon to provide a specific number of buyers who became “non-consensual enrollees” of its subscription services, according to legal documents.
It also wants Amazon to provide a record of disappearing text messages sent via so-called “ephemeral messaging” apps in which matters including signing up and unsubscribing are discussed, according to the filing.
Amazon also alleges that the FTC illegally denies its former and current executives access to attorneys who jointly represent the company and individuals.
“FTC staff have gone so far as to require that counsel drop a hearing for the first individual witness for failing to comply with this undue restriction,” Amazon alleges in its filing.
The FTC is investigating Amazon for allegedly using manipulative tactics to get customers to sign up for its Prime subscription service.
Earlier this year, Insider obtained internal documents showing that company officials were concerned that Amazon.com’s user interface designs had made customers feel tricked into signing up for Prime.
The controversy revolves around the alleged use of so-called “dark patterns” in which customers are locked into a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime when checking out items they buy online, only to be billed once a month. which ends the test.
In order for customers to unsubscribe, they must click through multiple pages as part of a time-consuming process, leading to complaints and even lawsuits from consumers.
The document indicates that the FTC investigation has expanded beyond the Prime division, as antitrust investigators are also said to be looking into other Amazon-owned subscription services, including Audible, Amazon Music, Kindle Unlimited and Subscribe & Save. .
Jeff Bezos’s company is not the only one being investigated in the United States, as last week Bloomberg News reported that the Justice Department is expected to file an antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet’s Google in the coming weeks for its market dominance. of online advertising.
These investigations show that many world governments are more vigilant of the activity carried out by each of the digital platforms or technology companies in the world, since these interfaces are currently the most used globally.
