Elizabeth Warren, United States senator who is regarded as part of the progressive faction of the
Democratic Party, has called for breaking up Amazon.com, a company founded by
American billionaire Jeff Bezos, after a Reuters report claimed that the online
retail giant had created “knock-off products” and manipulated product searches
in India.
Responding to the
report, the Democrat from Massachusetts, who had thrown her hat into the
presidential ring last year, wrote on Twitter: “These documents show that 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. This is one of the many reasons we need to break it up.”
Warren has spoken
out against “monopolistic” tendencies of large global corporations for a long
time and has called for breaking down behemoths. She has also slammed Jeff
Bezos, founder of Amazon who recently quit the CEO position at the retail giant
on grounds of not paying his “fair share” in terms of taxes.
On October 14,
right after veteran actor William Shatner took a space trip aboard Bezos’ New
Shepard spaceflight, Warren slammed “billionaires who are going into outer
space but do not pay their taxes on Earth”.
Also Read | Those who don’t pay taxes are shooting themselves into space: Elizabeth Warren
Elizabeth Warren
made the comments while specking at an interview with “The View” on ABC when
she was asked a question about Joe Biden’s trillion-dollar infrastructure plan
and who the money will come from. “The money is going to come from billionaires
who don’t pay their taxes and therefore have enough money to shoot themselves
into space.
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The Reuters
report, that Warren cited calling for the breaking up of Amazon, cited the
company’s internal emails, strategy papers and plans that allegedly show that
the retail giant ran a campaign to copy products and then sell them on its own
platform in India, one of Amazon’s largest growth markets.
Further, the
report also claimed that Amazon employees increased sale of Amazon
private-brand products by “rigging search results” so that the company’s
products would appear in the first two or three search results.