The retail giant Amazon apparently pressured the Information Technology Industry Council into ending its criticism of a lucrative government contact sought by the company and may have played an outsized role in helping the association choose its current CEO, the news site Bloomberg Businessweek reported Thursday.

At issue is a 2018 competition for a $10 billion contract to offer cloud computing services to the Pentagon. At the time, the IT Alliance for Public Sector (Itaps), a division of ITI, sent a letter to Congress complaining the contract was designed to choose only a single winner. Many tech companies complained the contact appeared designed to favor Amazon, and questions about possible conflicts of interest have forced the Department of Defense to delay choosing a winner.

As part of an article about Amazon's growing influence in Washington, D.C., Bloomberg reported that Amazon complained to former ITI CEO Dean Garfield about the Itaps letter but wasn't successful at first in silencing the group's criticism. However, that appeared to change in July 2018 when Garfield disbanded Itaps and scattered its portfolio among ITI's staff. Several ITI members feared Amazon has pressured the association into dropping its concerns about the contract and questioned Garfield about his decision at a November board meeting. He denied the allegations, an anonymous source told Bloomberg. (Garfield declined to comment for the article.)

Garfield left ITI in February to oversee global public policy for Netflix. The search for his successor was headed by Amazon's vice president for public policy, Brian Huseman—who is also vice chair of ITI's executive committee—along with an executive from the software development company Adobe. The job ultimately went to Electronic Transactions Association CEO Jason Oxman.

ITI spokeswoman Jennie Courts told Bloomberg that the group's "commitment to public-sector issues, including procurement and advancing the shared interests of our members, remains unchanged. Any inference otherwise is inaccurate."

Bloomberg also noted Amazon played a leading role in establishing the Alliance for Digital Information in 2018. The mission of the new group is to convince government officials to move more federal data to the cloud and adopt emerging technologies, both of which could benefit the company. At least 19 cloud-based companies have joined the association. https://bloom.bg/2VI6qFg

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