Investigations
“Accept more junk”: How Jeff Bezos is said to have deliberately sold off Amazon’s offer
Jeff Bezos places high demands on his employees
© Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images/AFP
Amazon temporarily made Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world. He was often not squeamish on the way up. The US authorities are now investigating two decisions.
Amazon is one of the most valuable companies in the world – and by far the most powerful online retailer. The US regulatory authority FTC is now accusing the company of abusing this power. Amazon is said to have deliberately made anti-customer decisions at the behest of founder Jeff Bezos. And obscure communication about it.
This emerges from the lawsuit that the authority filed against Amazomn and has now published. Accordingly, Bezos is said to have personally intervened and deliberately worsened the offer in order to increase profits. Specifically, it’s about the advertising that customers see when they search. Bezos therefore demanded that advertising be displayed there that the system had actually declared to be inappropriate. “Show more defects” is what the founder and long-time CEO is said to have said in a meeting. The goal was to double advertising revenue.
Order from above
According to the authorities, it was certainly a case of drastic false reports. For example, deer urine was advertised when people were looking for water bottles. When searching for jerseys from the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, shirts from the Seattle Seahwaks – a football team – were also shown.
What may seem like a harmless mistake at first glance can actually have consequences. According to the authority, 98 percent of customers would buy the first hit in a search that is highlighted by Amazon – even if this recommendation is an advertisement. Placing false hits there automatically worsens the purchasing experience, argues the FTC.
Amazon contradicts the accusation. “The claim that company management ordered more defective advertising to be accepted, thereby affecting the user experience, is grossly misleading and taken out of context,” a company spokesman told several media outlets. Amazon is making great efforts to continually improve the user experience.
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More accusations
In fact, the investigation is not limited to the advertising allegations. According to the authority, Amazon is said to have forced third-party sellers to use its own storage and delivery systems in order to appear higher in the ranking. The group is also accused of deliberately increasing prices using software called “Nessie” in order to force other sites to follow suit.
The company also denies these allegations.
Secret conversations
One of the most serious allegations, however, concerns communication within the company itself: Bezos and some management staff are said to have deleted internal messages and thus kept them secret from the authorities, the FTC suspects. But that would violate the documentation requirement.
Specifically, it’s about self-deleting messages on Messenger Signal. Bezos’ smartphone was hacked in 2019, after which people close to then US President Donald Trump tried to blackmail him out of an affair with nude photos. Find out more here. In response, Bezos ordered the company’s management to use the messenger, which is considered particularly secure.
The option is said to have been used to make messages disappear again after a certain period of time. According to the authorities’ findings, this was said to have been the case at least between 2019 and the beginning of 2022, and two years of communication are said to have been destroyed.
However, Amazon also denies this accusation. According to the company, they collected “the smallest details of the signal conversations from employees’ phones” and forwarded them to the FTC.
Redacted lawsuit
How exactly the authority substantiates the allegations is not known, nor are numerous other details of the lawsuit. The published statement of claim is largely blacked out in order to keep details about Amazon’s internal business figures, Prime user numbers and the like secret. It already contains significantly more details than before: a version published in September contained significantly more redactions.
Amazon has already announced that it will file a countersuit against the authority. The company said the allegations were “false, both in terms of the facts and the legal situation.”