In a move bolstering the appearance of Jeff Bezos‘ conflict of interest in his sprawling personal and business endeavors, Amazon has filed a lawsuit to prevent The Washington Post from obtaining records related to an internet satellite initiative.
The tech giant, in a lawsuit filed on Monday against a Washington state agency, says the records are exempt from a public records request because they contain proprietary information, though the department handling the inquiry decided that the records should be disclosed. The Post isn’t named as a defendant in the complaint.
The filing of the lawsuit coincides with escalating criticism that Bezos’ ownership of the outlet runs up against his ownership of Amazon, through which he’s incentivized to curry the favor of subjects the newspaper has been critical of, namely President Donald Trump. For the first time since 1988, the Post didn’t endorse a candidate for president. Bezos’ decision — in line with the Los Angeles Times choosing not to make an endorsement in the 2024 election — drew sharp rebuke from reporters, editors and readers, leading to at least 250,000 subscribers canceling their subscriptions.
The records requested by the Post concern Project Kuiper, an initiative intended to compete with Elon Musk’s SpaceX Starlink system, with the goal of increasing global broadband access through a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. Last year, Washington’s Department of Labor and Industries conducted four on-site investigations of one of the project’s facilities in the state. The outlet in November moved for “copies of inspection records, investigation notes, interview notes, complaints, and another (sic) documents related to” the investigations.
In the complaint, Amazon argues that the records Washington intends to hand over to the outlet include proprietary satellite designs, among other trade secrets. That information, the company says, “give it a competitive edge” over rivals and “derive their independent economic value from being generally unknown to the public at large.”
The company doesn’t seek to prevent disclosure of all of the requested records, only a subset that contains trade secrets that allegedly should be exempt from records requests. Under the Public Records Act, proprietary financial information and trade secrets aren’t subject to disclosure.
“Again, Amazon is only seeking to protect a narrow subset of documents requested by the Post that specifically relate to the technological and design aspects of Project Kuiper’s satellites, satellite constellation, and associated technologies, and any public interest in L&I’s investigations is more than satisfied by the materials for which Amazon is not seeking protection,” states the complaint, first reported by GeekWire.
The lawsuit also claims that the release of the records threatens public safety and the integrity of public infrastructure and telecommunications networks. It seeks a court order declaring that some of the information in the records at issue won’t be given to the Post.
In the wake of the outlet’s nonendorsement, Bezos said he may not be the ideal owner of the outlet from the perspective of “the appearance” of conflict of interest but defended his decision.
He said in December at the New York Times DealBook Summit. “The pluses of doing this were very small and [endorsements] added to the perceptions of bias if news media are going to try to be objective and independent.”
Read the full article here
