La Comisión Federal de Comercio de EE UU demanda a Amazon por manipular los precios de los anuncios de su plataforma

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a lawsuit against Amazon on Monday, alleging that the e-commerce giant deceived businesses advertising on its platform, according to The Wall Street Journal and later confirmed by the FTC itself. Twenty-two U.S. states have joined the case against Amazon. The complaint states that the company "engaged in deceptive and unfair practices that secretly inflated prices in its online advertising auctions," resulting in multimillion-dollar losses for advertisers.

The FTC alleges that Amazon secretly and significantly increased the prices that over a million brands and sellers had to pay to advertise on its platform over a period of more than seven years. FTC Chairman Andrew N. Ferguson stated, "When one of the world's largest online retailers engages in unfair and deceptive practices, the impact can be devastating.

Amazon has millions of advertising customers that were deceived into paying significantly higher prices. Those higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers. The FTC, under the Trump administration, will not allow this deception to continue." In September last year, Amazon had already agreed to pay $2.5 billion (€2.152 billion at the current exchange rate) in fines and refunds to Prime subscribers to resolve FTC accusations that it had deceived its customers to generate subscriptions.

This settlement was the second-largest repayment agreement reached with the FTC by a company, behind Meta's $5 billion payment in 2019 for violating consumer privacy. The lawsuit against Amazon has been joined by the states of Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Vermont, and Washington.

State attorneys general, along with the FTC, allege that Amazon has imposed undisclosed surcharges on its advertising customers, including more than 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses that participated in auctions to place ads on Amazon.com and its mobile application. In these auctions, potential advertisers bid to place Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Display Ads alongside search results for keywords on Amazon.

Auctions are conducted by the highest bidder for each keyword. According to the complaint, Amazon has assured potential advertisers for years that it conducts "second-price" auctions, where the winner pays "one cent more than the next highest bidder" for each successful ad keyword bid. However, the lawsuit claims that in practice, Amazon has charged its ad customers its own winning bid in nearly 80% of cases, effectively turning its nominal "second-price" auction into a first-price auction.