They lied, that's the problem. If they had said yes, we do indeed analyze what is happening in our marketplace to decide which products to launch, they wouldn't have gotten this letter.
It's not necessarily true, by the way, that they wouldn't have gotten flack from Congress if they'd initially testified that they use sales and product data only they possess to find out which third-party products are both profitable and vulnerable to lower-cost competition, use it again to design competing house brands that are identical to the third party products down to the smallest detail, and follow that up by using their website to promote the knockoff products as preferable to the third party products they've ripped off. This is not a standard industry practice and would likely not be defensible as "It's just a house brand, like Safeway Soup. What's the big deal?"
No. They're "quibbling" over whether Amazon executives perjured themselves. Perjury doesn't have a "but, like, is it really a big deal" test.
This is rubbish. There is a litany of recent, memorable cases. But they rarely met the legal threshold of contempt of Congress, and in the cases that did, there was seldom political will to prioritise its prosecution.
Congress, by design, is a political creature. We don't want the President (DoJ) rounding up people who speak to a co-equal branch of government because he--unilaterally--thinks they might have lied.
> Bezos said the company prohibits its employees from using data on individual sellers to benefit its own private-label product lines.
I could see someone hearing that and not realizing that per-SKU aggregation, or even clustered similar products, wouldn't break this rule.