Brief
FTC and 22 states sue Amazon over ad-auction pricing
The complaint says Amazon overrode advertised auction results and extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers since 2019.
Why it matters. A large share of indie ad spend sits inside Amazon Ads. This case will not change bids this weekend, but it is now part of the cost-of-doing-business story.
On 1 September the US Federal Trade Commission and a bipartisan group of 22 states filed suit in the Western District of Washington. The filing alleges that since 2019 Amazon has told roughly 1.2 million advertisers that competitive auctions set prices, then replaced those results with higher prices of Amazon’s choosing.
Dale Roberts covered the suit in his 3 September news episode, alongside Google’s new ebook-in-notebook feature and a library-lending study. No court has ruled. Authors who run Sponsored Products should keep recording cost-per-click and ACOS as usual, and treat any platform statement as a claim until the docket moves.