One of Amazon's first employees supports idea of breaking up company

Paul Davis, one of the first employees of Amazon who helped build the company’s online platform from scratch, is in favour of breaking the firm. Davis, a programmer hired by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in 1994, said that the company should separate Amazon Marketplace from its retail business.

Speaking to an American news portal, Davis said that the Amazon Marketplace, which allows merchants to sell goods on Amazon’s platform, is in the interest of the public. But questioned the ethics when the company also acts as a retailer which has complete access to every single piece of marketplace data. Amazon retail is the company’s core retail business that stocks and sells products itself. 

Misusing data

The former Amazon employee feared that the company can use the data to shape their own retail marketplace. Amazon has been accused of using the marketplace data to find the bestsellers and choosing to sell those products themselves. Davis said that though Amazon is not breaking any agreements, it is close to stealing sales of outside merchants.

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The comments from the programmer came at a time when the voices to break the monopoly of tech giants is reverberating in the United States. Democratic primary for 2020 presidential elections and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, during a debate, had pledged not to let ‘handful of monopolist’ dominate the countries economy. Warren had promised to make “big, structural changes” to the tech sector to “promote more competition” - including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

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Calling it as a ‘time to fight back’, Warren talked about the need to entrust anti-trust laws and break up “these giant companies that are dominating — Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Oil, all of them.”

“About 49 per cent of all sales online happen in one place - that's Amazon. It collects information from every little business, and then Amazon does something else,” said Warren.

“It runs the platform, gets all the information, and then goes into competition with those little businesses,” she added.

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