Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kahn was right about Roomba. Amazon was going to torpedo all the superior competition on the Amazon platform where almost all robot vacuums are sold in the US, plus as the e-commerce monopoly, Amazon was going to instantly have access to an army of cameras inside people’s homes to analyze personal information related to purchase preferences. IMO allowing Roomba to hit chapter 11 was still a better option for the cons…
Roomba was not competitive in the market, no amount of Amazon market manipulation would have changed that. Best case scenario, Amazon would have invested in making it competitive. Worst case, their engineers would have been absorbed into Amazon's warehouse robotics projects. Is either of those worse than what actually happened: the company is now a zombie brand for a Chinese company?
Amazon could email/push notification/text customers asking for reviews of iRobot vacuums but then not do the same for competing vacuums, skewing their reviews higher (asking for reviews boosts ratings by gathering opinions from happy customers who usually don't bother writing a review). Competing brands potentially don't even have your contact information to ask for a review.
Go on Amazon right now and search for "usb cable." There's a giant banner at the top that recommends the Amazon Basics brand, three across horizontally, which on my desktop monitor takes up nearly 50% of the screen real estate. Then below it are the Anker cables that you're more likely to be looking for.
They would have almost certainly been manipulating pricing on them as well. For example, they could take the strategy of lowering the price of the vacuums to break even or sell as a loss leader, but use them as a data-gathering robot in your house to help Amazon sell more of everything else. They could make their Alexa smart home platform preferential to iRobot or lock out competing models.
Robot vacuums are a consumer goods category that is heavily skewed toward Amazon.com as the place of purchase compared to other retailers.
I think "zombie brand owned by a Chinese company" is actually preferable, yes. They still operate and sell vacuums competing with the other robot vacuums on the market, and they aren't in service as household data collection bots for a monopoly e-commerce platform.
I don't think the ownership of the company being foreign or domestic is very relevant to the FTC's goal of preserving positive trade conditions. Would we think the iRobot situation was a bad outcome if iRobot was purchased by a foreign company we view more positively like Miele? We only think of it negatively due to anti-Chinese bias. iRobot being Chinese-owned is almost certainly the best possible outcome for preserving the amount of competition in the market.