Tech execs on defensive at antitrust hearing

Four of the nation’s largest tech companies sought to reassure skeptical lawmakers over their market power as the House ramps up its antitrust investigation into Silicon Valley.

Executives from Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google testified before the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee on Tuesday in a hearing examining the effect that their size has had on small businesses and their ability to innovate.

Each insisted that their platforms help smaller businesses reach customers and that they face stiff competition.

Amazon — the largest of the four, with a market cap just shy of $1 trillion — pointed to an “ever-broadening array of competitors” that they face in the retail market and touted their efforts to help third-party sellers on their platforms.

But Nate Sutton, Amazon’s associate general counsel, was forced to repeatedly insist to incredulous lawmakers that the company does not use the consumer data it collects to give its own products an advantage over those of third-party sellers.

Hard sell: Rep. David Cicilline (D-R.I.), who as chairman of the subpanel is leading the antitrust investigation, forcefully pressed Sutton about Amazon’s conduct towards those vendors.

“Amazon is a trillion-dollar company that runs an online platform with real-time data on millions of purchases and billions in commerce and can manipulate algorithms on its platform and favor its own products,” he said

Reminding Sutton that he was under oath, Cicilline asked, “So you collect all of this data of the most popular products and where they’re selling, and you’re saying you don’t use that in any way to change an algorithm to support the sales of Amazon-branded products?”

“Our algorithm such as the buy box is aimed to predict what customers want to buy, and we apply the same criteria whether you’re a third-party seller or Amazon to that because we want customers to make the right purchase regardless of whether it’s a seller or Amazon,” Sutton responded.