Reserve Judgment: The FTC Takes on Amazon’s Ad Auctions
The price to beat in Amazon’s advertising auctions may not have come from another advertiser at all, according to a lawsuit filed Aug. 31 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In the complaint, the FTC alleges that Amazon quietly set the price itself, promising one pricing rule and using another.
That allegation could support a conventional deception claim. If Amazon promised advertisers a genuine generalized second-price auction while deliberately concealing a material departure from that model, the FTC may have a viable case.
But the complaint tries to make a broader leap, arguing…
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