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Amazon on Wednesday bashed bipartisan antitrust legislation gaining momentum in Congress, claiming the bill would seriously hurt consumers and small businesses that rely on its popular Prime shipping service
The Senate bill, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which passed the Senate Judiciary Committee earlier this year, would prevent Amazon from unduly favoring its own products on its website or creating cheaper copycats of existing products using internal data. A nearly identical bill in the House passed the Judiciary Committee last year.
Big Tech companies and consumer advocate groups say the bill, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Chuck Grassley (R-IA), would kill many popular tech offerings, such as Amazon’s Prime shipping and Basics product line.
“Sen. Klobuchar’s vaguely worded bill would mandate that Amazon allow other logistics providers to fulfill Prime orders,” Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy, said in a blog post Wednesday.
“Such a mandate would make it difficult, and potentially impossible in practice, for Amazon and our selling partners to offer products with Prime’s free two-day shipping (let alone one-day),” he added.
ANTITRUST BILL WOULD DESTROY AMAZON PRIME, CRITICS SAY
The legislation, introduced last October, would forbid dominant online platforms from recommending or boosting their own products and services, a practice known as “self-preferencing.” The bill would also make it illegal for Big Tech platforms such as Amazon, Apple, and Google to discriminate against other businesses that use their platform in a manner that meaningfully harms competition.
The bill would empower the federal government’s antitrust enforcers, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, to sue the tech giants for instances of self-preferencing behavior outlined in the bill. If they are found guilty in court, companies could be fined up to 15% of their total U.S. revenues earned during the period in which the illegal conduct was occurring.
“This degradation of the Prime experience would materially hurt not just Amazon (which is what we believe to be the real, unstated goal of the legislation), but, more importantly, every American consumer and small business that currently relies on the Prime service,” Huseman added.
Amazon also said the legislation is unfair and lopsided because the online retail giant is the only retailer targeted by the bill, while rivals Walmart, Costco, Target, and CVS will not be affected because of the size of their companies. This is because the bill would only regulate companies with a market value of at least $550 billion, which includes Amazon, Google, and Apple.
“We don’t believe this threshold to be unintentional; but rather, targeted and intentional,” Amazon said in the blog post.
Klobuchar and Grassley maintain that tech products and features that people use frequently, such as Amazon’s Prime shipping, Google search results featuring Google’s own maps and videos, and apps on the Apple app store, will not be outlawed by the bill.
Instead, they say, the bill would result in a better consumer experience because certain online services and apps will become cheaper and the number of options will increase in Google searches, the Apple app store, and Amazon’s product choices.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Only conduct that materially harms competition in ways specified in the bill would be restricted, the bill’s proponents say. One example would be abusing a business’s data to compete against it, which Amazon has been accused of doing. Another example would be forcing a business to buy the parent platform’s services in order to receive preferred placement. Businesses would also be barred from ensuring that they benefit from search results on their own platforms as well as restricting certain businesses’ products from functioning fully within the platform.
