Amazon owns your grocery store, your medical records and your smart home devices. Now it could own your vacuum, too. Amazon announced Friday it plans to buy Roomba-maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. The move makes sense, at least given Amazon’s relationship with iRobot, which has for years been a major customer of AWS Lambda.

Amazon is expanding out, not up: Its past acquisitions have been in its non-dominant business segments. By avoiding snatching up other ecommerce or cloud storage companies, it aims to skirt the U.S. government’s antitrust red flags.

• Amazon’s grocery segment was small when it bought Whole Foods in 2017. Now, Amazon Go stores are ubiquitous in cities, and Whole Foods and Amazon are heavily intertwined.
• It didn’t have a position in security or video doorbells when it bought Ring in 2018, and now it dominates the doorbell market.
• Its purchase of MGM last year was allowed to go through. And its recent purchase of One Medical could pass without issue, given that its only work in the medical space is the nascent Amazon Pharmacy.

Several of its purchases also give it access to a mountain of personal data.

• For example, Amazon will now have access to the medical records of roughly 800,000 members.

• And Roomba vacuums have the ability to learn and map people’s floor plans.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission could argue that iRobot is part of the home electronics market generally, which Amazon definitely has a stronghold in (hey, Alexa). And it could also argue that it bought up the company that’s in direct competition with its Astro robot, which has growing pains of its own. That decision will determine whether Amazon is allowed to suck up your dirt as it continues to suck up your data.

— Nat Rubio-Licht