The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission has described Amazon’s reported use of its search engine to favour its own products as “potentially problematic”, in the latest indication of spreading scrutiny of big tech companies by US antitrust enforcers.
Joseph Simons, speaking at a Senate judiciary committee hearing in Washington on Tuesday, was responding to questions about a report in the Wall Street Journal this week that the ecommerce company had changed the weightings in its search engine in a way that could push its own products to the top of its search results, hurting other sellers on its site. Amazon later called the story “wrong” and “not factually accurate”.
“I can’t really comment on non-public investigations,” Mr Simon said when asked whether his agency was already investigating Amazon. However, he added: “These are the kinds of things that the [FTC’s] technology task force was designed to answer.”
The FTC has disclosed an antitrust investigation of Facebook, while Google confirmed earlier this month that it was the subject of a Department of Justice review.
The spreading investigations include industry-wide reviews also being undertaken by both agencies, as well as inquiries into Google and Facebook launched by separate groups of state attorneys-general this month,
Mr Simons and Makan Delrahim, head of the justice department’s antitrust division, both conceded that the overlap in their investigations into the tech industry was inefficient and caused confusion.
Asked by Utah senator Mike Lee, Republican chairman of the committee, whether turf wars between regulators showed the US antitrust enforcement regime was “broken in part”, Mr Simons said: “Yes, I’d agree with that.”
Mr Delrahim added: “I cannot deny that there are instances where chairman Simons and my time is wasted on those kind of squabbles.”
“It would be hard to imagine a system being designed as we have today,” the DoJ official added. US states, along with Washington DC and Puerto Rico, also have the power to bring antitrust cases under federal as well as local laws.
“All of them enforce the exact federal laws we do — it’s not the best model of efficiency,” Mr Delrahim said. Referring to the state-level tech investigations, he added: “In the early stage, we have to make sure we aren’t tripping over each other.”
Despite the admissions of overlap, the regulators were not challenged over why they had not stuck to an agreement to divide up the big tech companies for examination. In June, it emerged that they had reached an agreement for the DoJ to take on Google and Apple, leaving the FTC responsible for Facebook and Amazon.
Weeks later, however, the DoJ announced a more sweeping review of online platforms to look at “search, social media and some retail services online” — apparently extending its remit to companies it had ceded to the FTC.
The FTC, meanwhile, has not backed away from an industry-wide review of its own, under a task force set up earlier this year. “They are focused purely on high-tech platforms,” Mr Simons said of his agency’s task force. “They are very active. Anyone who has a complaint about a high-tech platform, please call because we’re all ears.”
In his opening remarks at the hearing, Mr Lee warned that looking into the same cases would “have the agencies stumbling over each other and will undermine enforcement efforts. Consumers deserve better than that.”
Asked whether the US antitrust system should be streamlined, Mr Simons said: “If you’re going to have only one agency, you might want one that looks more like the FTC than the DoJ.” That brought a quick response from the justice department enforcement chief: “I reserve the right to object, senator.”
The FT is free to read today. You can share this article using the buttons at the top.
