Amazon Is a Private Government. Congress Needs to Step Up.
At a hearing of the House’s antitrust subcommittee recently, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos seemed rattled to discover that his appearance was not a public-relations exercise but a deposition.
Bezos, who devoted much of his five-minute opening statement to talking about his childhood, appeared unprepared to field questions about his sprawling empire, which dominates online retail in the United States, controls the backbone for much of the web through its cloud-computing division, and has lately built a parcel-delivery operation that rivals UPS and the U.S. Postal Service. Remarkably, Bezos had never before testified in front of Congress. As pointed questions came at him from both sides of the aisle, he hesitated and stammered through many of his answers, and said—implausibly—that he didn’t know or couldn’t recall the details behind several of Amazon’s strategic decisions and core functions. On occasions when he did venture more of a response, he made incriminating admissions about specific tactics his company uses to snuff out competitors.
The hearing was one of the final steps in the subcommittee’s bipartisan, yearlong probe into whether Amazon and three other tech companies—Apple, Facebook, and Google—are abusing their market power to thwart competition for regulating the tech giants’ behavior, splitting them up into smaller companies, or both.
