2023-06-22 12:29:47
The United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is attacking Amazon. The equivalent of our DGCCRF launched proceedings against the e-commerce giant on Wednesday; she accuses him of signing up millions of consumers to his paid subscription service Amazon Prime without their consent and of making it difficult to undo that.
Amazon “knowingly tricked millions of consumers into signing up for Amazon Prime without knowing it”, denounces the FTC in the complaint filed in federal court in Seattle, which concludes an investigation opened in March 2021.
The company used “manipulative, coercive, or deceptive user interface designs, known as dark patterns or dark patterns, to trick consumers into signing up for auto-renewing Prime subscriptions,” writes the FTC, demanding refunds from impacted customers and a permanent injunction to prevent future violations.
The world’s largest subscription program
The complaint claims that internally, the cancellation procedure, which has several pages and many steps to make the customer doubt, is called “Iliad”, after Homer’s poem describing the endless Trojan War.
2. The complaint details how Amazon sought to thwart users who tried to cancel their subscriptions. Internally Amazon called this process the “Iliad Flow”—analogizing the cancellation process to the epic tale of a brutal war.https://t.co/1fAlN3Zo6w
— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) June 21, 2023
And until recent months, when changes were made under “substantial” pressure from the FTC, the company’s management “slowed down, avoided, and even reversed” changes to the membership interface that she knew they would negatively affect sales.
Amazon counters that the FTC’s claims are “false in fact and in law.” In her statement, she argues that “the truth is that customers love Prime, and we’ve designed a clear and simple process for customers to join or cancel their Prime membership.”
The company founded by Jeff Bezos is annoyed that it was not notified of the lawsuit, and which comes “in the midst of our discussions with FTC staff members to ensure that they understand the facts , background and legal issues”.
The lawsuit is one of several moves by President Joe Biden’s administration to limit the outsized market power of big tech companies, while trying to increase competition to protect consumers.
According to the FTC, Amazon Prime is the largest subscription program in the world, with more than 200 million subscribers, bringing in, not including their order amounts, $25 billion in revenue. In exchange for the 139 dollars paid per year in the United States, 69.90 euros in France since the increase, Prime subscribers benefit from free delivery of millions of items offered on the site, and access to films , music and series, as well as promotions for its “Prime Days”.
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