The bill is salty. Amazon accepted on Thursday to pay $ 2.5 billion to close a legal procedure initiated by the American Competition Authority (FTC), which accuses him of having cheated dozens of millions of consumers to register them and maintain in their premium paid service.
According to the agreement consulted by AFP, and must still be approved by the Federal Court of Seattle, $ 1.5 billion will be dedicated to compensating for injured subscribers, while one billion dollars will be paid to the United States Treasury through a fine.
In case of validation, this agreement would represent one of the largest financial adjustments obtained by the FTC in a case of consumer protection.
This agreement follows a complaint filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the presidency of Biden, said Amazon had cheated dozens of millions of customers by inciting them to subscribe to their main subscription program and had sabotaged their termination attempts.
Amazon will pay a civil dollars to the FTC and will have to reimburse $ 1.5 billion to around 35 million customers who have been affected by “an unwanted main record or delayed cancellation,” according to the agency cited by CNBC.
According to the agreement concluded on Thursday, Amazon undertakes to obtain explicit consent to any subscription and any tax, as well as simplify cancellation procedures, according to a protocol that must respect for ten years.
Amazon has always challenged the accusations, saying that he had improved his registration and cancellation processes.
With respect to Prime, the FTC had launched this procedure in 2023, accusing Amazon of having displayed manipulative interfaces, called “dark patterns”, so that consumers, when paying their purchase, also subscribe to the main service for $ 139 per year.
This pay subscription allows you to obtain several additional services, including free and fast deliveries, discounts from certain supermarkets or even access to the Amazon video platform.
The group faced two main complaints: having won subscribers without their explicit consent, making the possibility of clicking on the right buttons to reject the subscription, and having created a deliberately complex cancellation system, nicknamed “iliad” internally, called by Homer’s poem in the long and difficult war of Troy.
Amazon was also criticized for having charged his clients who have accused before communicating all the conditions of subscription to them.
The case began to be examined on Monday by a jury of the Federal Court of Seattle, chaired by Judge John Chun.
Judge Chun is also responsible for another case launched by the FTC against Amazon, this time by accusations of illegal monopoly. This other file will be judged in 2027.
Last week, Judge Chun also concluded that Amazon had violated a law on the protection of online buyers by recovering the billing data of the subscribers that prevail before explaining the conditions of use.
The FTC had based its procedure partly on the Rosca Law, which entered into force in 2010, which prohibits the online services of activated invoices by default, without clearly indicating the conditions or obtaining the explicit consent of the customers and providing simple dysbial procedures.
This issue is part of a series of recent prosecution that began in the United States, as well as the democratic and republican administration to limit the non -revealing domination of several large technology companies, such as Google or Apple, after years of government lenses.
Source: BFM TV
