Elizabeth Warren calls Amazon a 'monster that has to be fed every minute' as she pushes to break up the company

• Sen. Elizabeth Warren slammed Amazon in a recent CNN interview, renewing her calls to break it up.
• The lawmaker accused the company of "smashing little businesses before they ever get a foothold."

Sen. Elizabeth Warren castigated Amazon in a recent CNN Business interview, accusing the retail behemoth of crushing smaller businesses as the Massachusetts lawmaker ramps up her bid to break up the $1.7 trillion company.

Warren has made a name for herself as a reliable antagonist toward big tech and its leaders, most recently going after Amazon for its labor troubles.

But in an interview this week, the senator redirected her animosity at the company's tilt toward monopolization.

"Amazon has the power and uses it to smash little businesses before they ever get a foothold," Warren told CNN.

She criticized the website for selling everyday products while simultaneously controlling the primary platform people use to purchase such products.

"You can either be the umpire or a player on the field. But you can't be both. That's what Amazon does," Warren told the outlet. "What's the solution here? Break Amazon up."

Warren reportedly took specific umbrage with a recent Reuters investigation that revealed Amazon ran a "systemic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results" in order to boost its own product lines in India, one of its top growing markets.

The outlet reported that Amazon used third-party sellers' data to copy products and promote them to shoppers. The company rejected the allegations, denying that it gives preferential treatment to any seller or marketplace and emphasizing that its search result display doesn't favor its own private-brand products.

But Warren reportedly doesn't trust that response.

"How was Amazon able to build a huge clothing presence? The answer is they had inside information about what Indians were buying," Warren said. "Most people think of antitrust as simply the area a company is in. But what Amazon has shown is how a company can dominate in one area and then leverage that into dominance across multiple areas."

Following the report's publication earlier this week, Warren renewed her calls to break up the company,

A spokesperson with Amazon declined to comment directly on the senator's remarks, and instead, pointed Insider to two blog posts from last year that rejected calls to break the company up.

In one, the company argues that "fringe notions on antitrust would destroy smaller businesses and hurt consumers." The second explains that while Amazon is a large company, it operates in a competitive, "highly fragmented" global market.

"Amazon starts off as the dominant book delivery service," she told CNN. "And then it starts morphing into other products and becomes the dominant delivery service. Now it's like a monster that has to be fed every minute."