Senator pushes DOJ to launch criminal antitrust probe of Amazon

Enlarge / NEW YORK, NY - SEPTEMBER 9: Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) attends a a special Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental affairs hearing on "The State of Homeland Security after 9/11" at the National September 11th Memorial & Museum on September 9, 2019 in New York City. The hearing featured three former secretaries of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) (credit: Drew Angerer | Getty Images)

Amazon is already facing a bevy of antitrust probes, both in the United States and overseas. Just about every state, federal, and international regulator with any kind of competition regulation power is investigating the company over some aspect of its business. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), however, wants to add one more to the pile and is calling on the Justice Department to launch a criminal probe.

"Recent reports suggest that Amazon has engaged in predatory and exclusionary data practices to build and maintain a monopoly," Hawley wrote today in a letter (PDF) to Attorney General William Barr. "These practices are alarming for America's small businesses under ordinary circumstances. 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."

The recent report to which Hawley refers is last week's Wall Street Journal exposé, which found that Amazon employees accessed third-party merchants' data as a matter of habit in order to launch their own in-house products and undercut the marketplace vendors who rely on Amazon as a platform.