Arizona accuses Amazon of being a monopoly and deceiving consumers with “dark patterns”

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Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/15/24157542/arizona-amazon-sues-deceptive-practices-antitrust-prime-buy-box

Arizona’s Attorney General, Kris Mayes, filed two lawsuits against Amazon on Wednesday for allegedly engaging in deceptive business practices and maintaining monopoly status. The first lawsuit accuses the company of using dark patterns to keep users from canceling their Amazon Prime subscriptions, violating Arizona’s Consumer Fraud Act. This is similar to a complaint filed by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) against Amazon in June.
The second lawsuit alleges that Amazon unfairly maintains its monopoly status through agreements with third-party sellers that restrict them from offering lower prices off of the platform than they do on Amazon, violating Arizona’s Uniform State Antitrust Act. This practice has also been targeted by other state attorneys general in cases filed against Amazon.
Additionally, the lawsuit accuses Amazon’s Buy Box algorithm of being biased towards first-party retail offers or sellers who participate in Fulfillment By Amazon, leading consumers to overpay for items that are available at lower prices from other sellers on Amazon. This aspect is also reflected in the FTC’s recent antitrust lawsuit against Amazon, which has been joined by more than a dozen state attorneys general.
Arizona seeks to stop Amazon from engaging in these allegedly deceptive and anticompetitive practices and award civil penalties and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains.

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rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
about damn time a company was targeted in a lawsuit over dark patterns.

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- ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  It really should be fraud. It is deception used for personal gain. While I think it should be fraud, it will probably need new legislation to make it so.
  
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Vertelleus@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The result will be Amazon gets a baby fine and shrugs it off as the cost of doing business.

Without fines being proportional to the business annual income nothing will be accomplished.

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dogslayeggs@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I hate Amazon probably more than most people in the world and have been boycotting them since roughly 1999, but… “dark patterns???”

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- AbidanYre@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yes, dark patterns
  
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  - Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    People should definitely learn about these, they affect an awful lot of our modern digital environment, not just in subscriptions but all the ways companies try to manipulate our behaviour.
    
    Ever see a cookie popup and “Accept” is a big colourful button, but if you want to decline it’s behind a grey “more options” button, then you have to scroll through a dozen different categories and disable them all, then the button has some ambiguous label like “confirm cookie choices” which gives the impression you’re accepting them again? That’s a dark pattern.
    
    User interface design has long known how to streamline a process and communicate with a user to increase the number of people who complete a certain task, so it’s a simple matter of inverting that logic to make a task hard and obscure to reduce that number.
    
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  - dogslayeggs@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Ah, so dark as in evil, not dark as in low light. I hadn’t heard of that, but going through the darkpatterns.org website is basically a laundry list of shit I hate.
    
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  - brbposting@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I like how Facebook intentionally delays spam reports made via Messenger on desktop. That’s after clicking through excessive prompts (which are more understandable due to the general public’s abuse of reporting features).
    
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- Grangle1@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The term “dark pattern” refers to any deceptive practice, no matter how small or insignificant it may seem, that online websites, apps, etc use to get people to do the site/app’s desired behavior, such as in this case, not cancel their Prime subscription. Not all of these examples may apply in Amazon’s case, but some examples would be making the fields or buttons for canceling or keeping your subscriptions different colors or sizes, making the default choice to keep the subscription, making you view a bunch of ads to keep the sub or go through a bunch of other pages before canceling, or hiding the cancelation option in fine print in a corner of the site. The “dark” part means that the average person usually doesn’t notice the deceptive nature of the practices.
  
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- eleitl@lemmy.ml ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  If you haven’t noticed, you’ve been not paying attention. I canceled Prime a while ago and they try very hard to get you back. And they try to sneak on you billed expedited shipping when over minimum gratis shipping quota. Dark patterns galore.
  
  It would be a major pain for me to boycott them completely so I don’t, yet.
  
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  - dogslayeggs@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I’ve been boycotting Amazon since 1999, so no I haven’t been paying attention.
    
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ivanafterall@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We don't know their mind. We don't know their kind. Dark necessities are part of their design.

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KonalaKoala@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
And now probably can’t wait until someone accuses Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft, Twiiter/X, Reddit, etc., of similar anti-trust monopoly practices and give the fediverse the appearance of the only option to switch to.

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uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
As someone highly susceptible to dark patterns, I’d like to see more regulation and investigation of them in commercial practices.

Heck, some kinds of commercial fluffing are outright lies.

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Corr@lemm.ee ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I don’t mean to support amazon in this, but the article outlines them promoting their own products over others? Unless the buy box implies something other than “we would like you to buy this”, I dont really understand the issue with that particular point

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cmrn@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I didn’t read a single thing beyond the title but… yeah that checks out

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