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Comment by aaronbrethorst

6 years ago

As it happens, the Congresswoman who represents the part of Seattle that contains Amazon is on the House Judiciary committee, and may also very well be your member of Congress. Seems like something her office would probably want to know about if you could substantiate the claim.

https://www.wsha.org/policy-advocacy/legislative/u-s-congres...

(ignore the odd source of the link. it's the only place I could find her CoS and District Director's email addresses.)

24 comments

aaronbrethorst

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rattray  6 years ago

It didn't sound like GP was saying their team did anything illegal – they accessed _public_ information about the companies they were copying.

It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime. IANAL.

  • jessaustin  6 years ago

    Neither "traction of products hosted on its platform" nor "customer list of those hosted products" are typically public information. They are information to which a trusted vendor might have access. There seems to be a fine line between trusting Amazon to sell and ship one's products and services without using its position to sell competing products and services, and trusting AWS to host one's confidential data without reading that data...

    • dataminded  6 years ago

      For web and mobile app stuff this type of competitive intelligence is very available (builtwith, datanyze, etc). Also, startups never shut up about who their clients are, social proof to land more deals.

      *typo

      1 reply →

    • koheripbal  6 years ago

      You're right - but this isn't the first time we've heard about this exact practice. It's been reported on extensively, so if anyone was going to investigate something illegal, it would have happened.

      It is however, good ground for an Anti-Trust case. Using your position as a market maker to push your own products is literally illegal anti-competitive behavior and can trigger a court order to break up the company.

      3 replies →

    • rattray  6 years ago

      Ah, sorry, "customer list of those hosted products" I had missed somehow, that in particular definitely sounds proprietary.

  • throwaway_USD  6 years ago

    >It definitely feels scummy, but it didn't sound like GP had access to evidence of a crime.

    Violating Anti-trust statues isn't criminal...but it is still illegal. Anti-trust violations also aren't the only potential laws this would violate. It sounds like it would violate unfair trade practices as well (most states has statues/laws/codes on point).