Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is calling on federal prosecutors to open a criminal antitrust investigation into Amazon, as laid out in a letter [PDF] released on Tuesday. From a report: In his letter to Attorney General William Barr, Hawley presses the Justice Department to open an investigation into Amazon’s data tactics that were detailed in a report from The Wall Street Journal last week. In this report, the Journal outlined several instances in which Amazon employees peered into the sales data from independent sellers in order to develop its own competing, private label products.

“These practices are alarming for America’s small businesses even under ordinary circumstances,” Hawley wrote. “But at a time when most small retail businesses must rely on Amazon because of coronavirus-related shutdowns, predatory data practices threaten these businesses’ very existence.” After the Journal’s report last week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee wrote statements seeking clarification on whether a top Amazon official had “lied” to Congress about its data practices in a previous hearing. Last July, Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel, said that the company does not use third-party data to create its own products.

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Source: Slashdot – Sen. Josh Hawley Calls For a Criminal Antitrust Probe into Amazon