On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee held its last hearing as part of its one-year investigation into anti-competitive behavior in the technology industry. As part of that investigation, lawmakers obtained about 1.3 million documents from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google before their final hearing with the CEOs of each of the companies. Dozens of these documents were released Wednesday, including email threads between CEO Jeff Bezos and other Amazon employees explaining the company’s decision to buy Ring.
“Feel good to go ahead with Ring’s due diligence, willing to pay for market position as it’s hard to catch the leader,” Jeff Helbling, Amazon vice president, said in an email dated October 11. from 2017. Amazon officially bought Ring in February 2018.
Amazon’s acquisition of Ring not only provided the e-commerce giant with access to home security services and devices, but also provided a new outlet for its own voice assistant, Alexa. After purchasing Ring, Amazon integrated its Alexa voice assistant into the devices, allowing users to control their video doorbells via voice and expand the company’s position as a titan of Internet-connected homes.
But the emails show that, at the time, Bezos viewed the value of the Ring as primarily strategic. “To be clear, my opinion here is that we are buying a market position, not technology,” Bezos wrote in an email thread four months before the company acquired Ring. “And that market position and momentum is very valuable.”
Bezos said during Wednesday’s hearing that Amazon buys other companies primarily to position itself in the market. “There are several reasons why we could buy a company,” said Bezos. “Sometimes we are trying to buy some technology or IP, sometimes it is an acquisition of talent. But the most common case is the position in the market “
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Throughout Wednesday’s hearing, Amazon received criticism from lawmakers who feared the e-commerce giant had dipped into independent vendor data to inform its own product decisions. At the beginning of this year, the Wall street journal They reported that Amazon employees accessed third-party vendor sales data to guide their development of private label products.
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) asked Bezos directly, “Does Amazon ever access seller and user data when making business decisions?”
Bezos replied that Amazon has a policy that prohibits that practice, but could not “guarantee” that “that policy has never been violated.” He continued: “We continue to analyze it very carefully. I’m still not satisfied that I got to the bottom of this. ”
