FTC Lawsuit Against Amazon’s Prime Is Poor Use of Limited Resources
The Federal Trade Commission is suing Amazon for allegedly tricking customers into signing up for the company’s Prime membership and making it difficult to cancel that subscription service, providing expedited free shipping and access to its streaming entertainment service. You’re right if this strikes you as an odd fight for the FTC to pick.
Prime has 148.6 million members. Amazon is among the highest-rated companies for favorability and trustworthiness, according to multiple polls. Last year, JPMorgan estimated the actual value of the $14.99 monthly, or $139 annual Prime subscription, is as much as $1,000. Even at the apex of stress on the company, while most of America was stuck at home for fear of COVID-19, customer dissatisfaction was still low and mostly stemmed from shipping delays.
The FTC’s specific accusations against the world’s largest online retailer are no less strange. In court documents, the agency claims that Amazon “has knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in its Amazon Prime service” and “used manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions.”
Dark patterns are website design elements intended to lead users toward certain choices. In this case, those preferred outcomes are subscribing to and not canceling Prime membership.
To be sure, Amazon tries to persuade its users to join Prime. It also seeks to make that process easy for aspiring subscribers via website design choices, but that is far from illegal. Consumers are urged to join rewards programs at the grocery store in return for similar savings in the brick-and-mortar world with little objection from regulators. Besides, a hefty 35 percent of Amazon customers do not enroll in Prime. As the learning curve for online commerce flattens with users’ experience, claims of consumers being “dupes” are increasingly unconvincing.
Read the full article on the D.C. Journal.