this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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427
Arizona accuses Amazon of being a monopoly and deceiving consumers with “dark patterns” (www.theverge.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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  • 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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[–] [email protected] 46 points 6 months ago* (last edited 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.

What's honestly surprising is that this is actually illegal somewhere. I didn't realise there was any legislation about this.