October 15, 2021

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren called for breaking up online retail giant Amazon while Indian retailers called for a government investigation into the tech giant after a Reuters investigation found that the e-commerce giant had copied products and manipulated search results in India.

The Reuters report, which analyzed thousands of Amazon’s internal documents, concluded that the US retail giant was conducting a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and rigging search results to bolster its own private brands in India, one of the tech giant’s key growth markets.

Warren, a longtime critic of Amazon, said “these documents show what we feared about Amazon’s monopoly power — that the company is willing and able to rig its platform to benefit its bottom line while stiffing small businesses and entrepreneurs.”

Asked for comment, Amazon released a statement referring to the statement it made about the Reuters investigation.

“These allegations are incorrect and unsubstantiated,” it said. “We display search results based on relevance to the customers, irrespective of whether such products are private brands offered by sellers or not.”

A group representing millions of India’s homegrown retailers also called on their national government to launch an investigation of Amazon.

For more information, you may view the original story from Reuters.