Amazon is ‘strong-arming its vendors’ on prices, California AG says

Happy Tuesday! Here’s your Tuesday Tech Drop, the past week’s top stories from the intersection of politics and technology.

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Amazon’s alleged price-fixing exposed

California’s attorney general says newly released emails prove that Amazon has colluded with other companies to raise prices on various products. Attorney General Rob Bonta announced Monday that he had released the previously redacted emails, which were originally included in a court filing from his office’s antitrust lawsuit against the company.

The filing alleges that the online retailer “insulates itself from competition by strong-arming its vendors into raising prices offered by its competitors.” In Monday’s news release, Bonta is quoted as saying, “The evidence we’ve uncovered is clear as day: Amazon is working to make your life more unaffordable.”

Amazon denied the claims, saying in a statement:

The Attorney General’s motion is a transparent attempt to distract from the weakness of its case, coming more than three years after filing its complaint and based on supposedly ‘new’ evidence it has had for years. Amazon is consistently identified as America’s lowest-priced online retailer, and we’re proud of the low prices customers find when shopping in our store. Amazon looks forward to responding in court at the appropriate time.

Read more at CNBC.

Military pettiness 

Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll ordered the shutdown of all social media accounts associated with the Army’s Soldier for Life unit after a post that praised Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a war veteran.

Read more at The Hill.

Uber issues 

A federal jury in North Carolina found Uber liable in civil court for the actions of a driver who grabbed a passenger by her inner thigh and asked if he could “keep her” with him.

Read more at The Associated Press.

Sketchy Starlink connection

The potential danger of the federal government’s widespread reliance on Elon Musk’s Starlink internet service was exposed last summer when several unmanned vessels were left bobbing in the Pacific Ocean due to Starlink failures. A new report from Reuters says the incident highlights “the challenges of the U.S. military’s growing reliance on SpaceX,” the Musk-led company that owns Starlink, “and the risks it brings to the Pentagon.”

Read more at Reuters.

DOJ spurns France

The Justice Department has told France that it has no plans to assist with the country’s probe of Musk and his social platform, X, related to incidents in which X’s artificial intelligence tools promoted Holocaust denial and nonconsensual sexually explicit imagery, including apparent child porn. The Trump administration basically accused France of picking on a U.S. company, and I wrote about the administration’s stonewalling.

Read more at MS NOW.

Pro-Trump trickery

A new report from The New York Times highlights a deceptive trend involving hundreds of fake, AI-generated avatars that look like real people as they promote President Donald Trump across various social media platforms.

Read more at The New York Times.

Roblox settlements

Alabama has reached a settlement with Roblox to avoid a lawsuit over allegations that the gaming platform left children vulnerable to abuse. The deal follows a similar settlement Roblox just reached with Nevada.