FTC accuses Amazon of running a 'secret ad surcharge scheme' in new lawsuit
psychanarch
11 points
1 comment
August 31, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (1 comments)
benoau
> According to the FTC, Amazon told more than 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses that it ran a “second-price” auction where the winning advertiser would pay just one cent more than the next-highest bid, rather than the full amount of their own bid. > But the FTC alleges that starting in 2019, Amazon made a “surreptitious” change without telling advertisers. It added a hidden surcharge that Amazon internally called a “soft reserve price,” and used what one internal document called an “invented auction participant” — a fake bidder, basically — to push prices higher than true competition would have produced. Straight up fraud, if it's as they say.