Amazon CEO Bezos willing to testify before U.S. Congress

Amazon.com Inc. saidon Monday its founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos is willingto testify to a congressional panel investigating potentialviolations of U.S. antitrust law by big technology companies.

The company confirmed a letter that its attorney sent tomembers of the House judiciary committee saying Amazon hadco-operated with the probe.

"This includes making Jeff Bezos available to testify at a hearing with the other CEOs this summer," said the letter, signed by Robert Kelner of Covington and Burling LLP.

The big four tech platforms Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Apple Inc., Amazon and Facebook Inc. are under investigation by a House judiciary committee panel and the U.S. Justice Department. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is probing Facebook and Amazon, and groups of U.S. state attorneys general are looking at Facebook and Google.

Kelner said in the letter that Amazon and the committee would need to "resolve a number of questions regarding timing, formatand outstanding document production issues, all necessarily framed by the extraordinary demands of the global pandemic."

This would be the first time that Bezos has appeared beforeCongress, according to a source familiar with the company.

Accusations over data from third-party sellers

In early May, the committee wrote Bezos todemand his testimony in the wake of a report that the onlineretailer uses data from its third-party sellers to createcompeting products. Amazon's associate general counsel, NateSutton, had denied under oath last July that Amazon usedsensitive information from its independent sellers to developAmazon products.

Further, the letter also saidthat Amazon had given the committee's antitrust panel large numbers of documents totalling more than 225,000 pagesand that the committee has not given a "binding commitment" that the documents would be treated as confidential.