New unsealed records reveal Amazon's price-fixing tactics, California AG claims

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/16/amazon-price-fixing-california-lawsuit

by kmfrk • 3 months ago

274 75 3 months ago

theguardian.com

worik• 3 months ago

Unsurprising

Did Amazon think they were too big to convict?

I wonder if they will meet the fate of Standard Oil, back in the day.

fmajid3• 3 months ago

No, Antitrust law was effectively neutered by the Chicago School and their agent Robert Bork.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...

(BTW that source is right-wing and can hardly be said to be biased against Bork).

vondur• 3 months ago

That's fascinating. Bork was denied being on the supreme court but his ideas shaped current antitrust laws. It feels a bit like the old Standard Oil argument: It's ok to have a huge market share so long as pricing for goods gets cheaper even if it hurts competition overall. *edited* for grammar.

trollbridge• 3 months ago

Amazon would be smart to settle with no admission of wrongdoing and an agreement to seal documents lest every other state end up following suit.

ikidd• 3 months ago

The documents can be subpoenaed for a new proceeding from the source.

fmajid3• 3 months ago

[flagged]

add-sub-mul-div• 3 months ago

[flagged]

113• 3 months ago

Seems like that's just for protesters.

cucumber37328422• 3 months ago

That would be like showing up for the battle of Kursk with an M18 battalion. Might go well at first, you might score some big flashy wins, but....ugh... things are gonna get worse as the party goes on and it's generally an ill advised strategy.

Rico as written and enforced walks right up to the limit of constitutionality in a dozen ways. It's built for speed. It's never really been thrown into a knock down drag out legal action between titans on equal footing (i.e. a bigco legal team, potentially helped by other bigcos). It might survive nominally but it probably won't come out the other end in serviceable condition. You might win a few but eventually an appeal will find its target and end your day.

I say go for it. Heads I win. Tails you get RICO reform.

wombatpm2• 3 months ago

I’d be ok with civil asset forfeiture for corporate officers

gruez2• 3 months ago

Under the law, the meaning of racketeering activity is set out at 18 U.S.C. § 1961. As currently amended, it includes:

It lists plenty of crimes, but anti-trust violations isn't one of them.

Also, obligatory https://web.archive.org/web/20170301062028/https://www.popeh...

See specifically sections "Wait. Isn't the defendant the enterprise?" and "So what's "racketeering activity"?"

Finnucane• 3 months ago

"It's never RICO"--Popehat

yabutlivnWoods• 3 months ago

Shouldn't be hard with the obvious circular investing and... oh yeah... the poaching emails between Steve Jobs and Eric at Google back in the day, along with emails revealed during a discovery phase where big tech CEOs were agreeing to act in each other's interests as if they were one big family of companies; it's just physics, afterall

But everyone was making tons of money due to ZIRP trickle down no one cared then

tomhow• 3 months ago

This seems like a grand proclamation rather than a curious conversation-starter about the specific case the article is about. The guidelines have different ways of asking us to avoid this kind of comment.

Please don't fulminate...

Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It would make all the difference if the comment included some commentary on why Antitrust law is inadequate in this case and how RICO would be likely to enable a better outcome.

lelandfe2• 3 months ago

If you've ever seen those "Click To Reveal Price" or "Price Only Revealed At Checkout" products online, this here is one reason why. They help businesses keep discounted prices hidden from Amazon's crawlers.

fg137• 3 months ago

Is it effective, like, at all?

14• 3 months ago

I know myself as well as others in my family have talked about this many times and have a hard rule that if someone has to hide the price they are ashamed of it and we refuse to support them. I literally experienced this tonight. I've been wanting to try some SnackCrates the service where you get snacks from around the world delivered monthly or just a single box if you want. Well the Company SnackCrate stopped shipping to Canada so been looking for another company that does. I see an ad on Facebook and check it out. First looked if they deliver to Canada before anything else. Then try find a price and you can't. Looked all over their site with nothing that even hints at the cost. They want you to first do a snack test to determine good snacks you may like then provide information and so on. Then you can see pricing options. I refuse to do that. Instantly left the site and read the comments on Facebook where I then saw several comments state how expensive they were for such little abouts of snack which made me say yep they are ashamed of the price and that's why they hide it.

ggreer2• 3 months ago

This can also be true if the manufacturer of the product requires that retailers not offer a price below a certain amount. This is called the minimum advertised price (MAP) and is common for big brands like Apple. Another way to get around the minimum advertised price is to bundle the product with some other product or service, such as is done with cell phone contracts.

xnx• 3 months ago

Blame the manufacturer for this, not the reseller.

lelandfe2• 3 months ago

It can be both. I worked for a brand that wanted to have a sale just on their own, new site to be able to drive visits, but Amazon's "most favored nation" policies would have caused a backlash.

binarysolo5• 3 months ago

Long-time seller/distributor here -- the main reason for this is mandated by brands, who want to make sure their MAP (minimum advertised price) is respected across all channels.

Basically different distribution channels (speciality shops, big box marketplaces, and ecom stores) have very different levels of overhead, so if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).

This pretty much happened in the early 2000s-2010s so over time brands became VERY particular about enforcing MAP.

TeMPOraL• 3 months ago

you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low)

This is what I see happen in Poland with clothes and electronics stores, but I don't exactly understand what MAP is supposed to be solving here, given that the brick&mortar and on-line stores are literally the same entity/brand, and in case of clothing, they're also the manufacturer brand?

Joker_vD• 3 months ago

if each channel was allowed to set their own price, you'd end up with brick and mortar stores doing a lot of showrooming and then online stores gaining the bulk of sales because they're cheaper (because their overhead is low).

Um... and? That's quite literally "the market working as intended" and while I am not a free-market apologist by any stretch, that seems to be a rather benign effect.

What makes MAP especially suspicious in my eyes is that it's the manufacturers that seem to be overly concerned over well-being of one specific kind of their downstream buyers/distributors/resellers, not those distributors/resellers themselves. I understand that if B&M stores would try to impose that, then the FTC would (hopefully) smack it down pretty quickly but apparently when a manufacturer mandates the price to the resellers, it's perfectly fine? Somehow? Isn't there collusion somewhere in there, probably?

thaumasiotes• 3 months ago

If you've ever seen those "Click To Reveal Price" or "Price Only Revealed At Checkout" products online, this here is one reason why. They help businesses keep discounted prices hidden from Amazon's crawlers.

That is obviously not a reason why, considering the place where I've seen those listings is Amazon.

SilverElfin2• 3 months ago

We need all new antitrust laws. The size of these companies is itself a problem. They have so much power that there is no possibility for fair competition. Maybe we can start by taxing companies that are worth more than 1 trillion at an extremely high rate.

foobarian• 3 months ago

I wonder who would prosecute them. What about an AG who, when confronted about doing a bad job, deflects by pointing out that Nasdaq is "smashing records?"

cogman102• 3 months ago

I'd be in favor of giving Lina Khan a lifetime appointment to heading the FTC along with 10x their current budget to tackle exactly this problem.

A major part of the problem isn't even that we don't have laws on the books, it's that funding to the enforcement agencies has been gutted to the point where they can mostly just go after extreme egregious violations or very easy to win cases. The IRS is in exactly the same boat.

hoppyhoppy2• 3 months ago

She's not the AG anymore, though I'm not claiming that Todd Blanche is better.

blackjack_2• 3 months ago

Luckily, Lina Khan has just announced The Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which is going to be training the next generation of antitrust lawyers for the US. If we are lucky, she will also be working on much bigger things than that at the same time. If we are doubly lucky, she will be training hundreds of new lawyers as good as she is.

ggreer2• 3 months ago

It's odd that this is a request for a preliminary injunction considering that the case is almost four years old. Both the 2022 and the new filing are heavily censored[1][2], so I can't know for sure, but I didn't notice any revelation in the latest filing. Amazon requires that anyone selling through their platform not offer lower prices elsewhere online. If a seller does so, they'll be relegated to the "New & pre-owned" offers section below the "Add to cart" & "Buy it now" buttons. This has been the case since at least 2019. (This also means that if you're shopping on Amazon and want a better deal, you should check the other offers section for a cheaper price.)

Lots of retailers (both physical & online) have similar requirements, and many manufacturers have similar requirements for minimum advertised prices (such as Apple). I think the California AG's plan is to argue that the pricing rules combined with Amazon's large market share merit a judgement against them, but it's going to be an uphill battle to single out one company for practices that are common to the industry.

1. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/2022-...

2. https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/REDAC...

thayne2• 3 months ago

Lots of retailers (both physical & online) have similar requirements

My understanding (IANAL) is that that is illegal, and those retailers should be prosecuted as well. That is essentially price fixing, because the retailer is enforcing their competitors have the same price, using the supplier as an intermediary.

many manufacturers have similar requirements

That is a different situation, and is AFAICT legal in the US (but not in many other countries, and IMHO probably shouldn't be legal), at least in some situations, but there are limits.

Ferret7446• 3 months ago

Is that actually bad for consumers? Wouldn't deranking the "not lowest" price make it easier for customers to find the lowest price (whether that is a different product on the same storefront, or the same product on a different storefront), and hence be good for customers?

reenorap• 3 months ago

How is this not a complete violation of anti-trust laws? If the federal government won't pursue it (questionable in this environment), surely there's more than enough to go after it state-by-state.

And can't we do a class-action lawsuit against Amazon at this point?

dmix• 3 months ago

You're replying to an article about an anti trust investigation into Amazon that is currently in pre-trial preliminary stages. Which is why the article is talking about information they discovered during the course of it.

jmyeet• 3 months ago

The entire use case of dynamic pricing is to raise prices.

Airlines were really the first to do this but there it kinda makes sense. You have a plane. It's going anyway. You want to fill it.

At the other extreme is RealPage, which is explicitly designed to raise rents and it's used by enough people that you can view it as the last frontier of anti-trust, anticompetitive behavior and price-fixing. It's also state-sanctioned violence because your price-fixing scheme has the threat of you being homeless attached to it.

That's another aspect to this: collusion doesn't happen in dark smoke-filled rooms anymore. It can be as simple as all "competitors" simply using the same software, which tells them all to do the same thing.

Another commenter had it right: this is beyond antitrust or competition law. It's a RICO issue.

There's no real structural reason for inflation since the pandemic. The pandemic simply broke the seal on raising prices and now everybody is in on it.

parineum• 3 months ago

It's also state-sanctioned violence because your price-fixing scheme has the threat of you being homeless attached to it.

Explain "violence", please.

LorenPechtel• 3 months ago

And what's really stupid about this is that done openly there probably wouldn't be an issue. Insurance companies can demand providers charge them the lowest rate they charge anyone. Would there have been any issue if Amazon had simply said that to get those features you must match any deals you give anyone else?

snovv_crash• 3 months ago

Selling to a reseller at the same price isn't an issue. The problem is disallowing selling direct to customer at a lower price. It means if someone makes another online marketplace, let's call it Ganjes, then if they have lower overheads they can't sell for less than Amazon does. Similar for DTC from the manufacturer.

gnopgnip• 3 months ago

Amazon isn’t doing this to benefit customers. A seller/store with an item priced at $100 and selling at a discount on their own site would be pushed off the buy box and customers could see the item for sale for $120 from another seller.

refurb• 3 months ago

If Amazon punishes sellers for having lower prices elsewhere, isn’t it the sellers choice whether to lower their price on Amazon OR raise their price for other sellers?

I didn’t see anything in the article suggesting Amazon ask for the 2nd option, just examples of sellers who did the 2nd one.

avidiax• 3 months ago

You are correct that the merchants have that choice.

Amazon's behavior is still anti-competitive. They are the big boys. The drive lots of volume, and have high fees. This policy makes it impractical for most vendors to support Amazon's competitors or compete with Amazon themselves. And it robs customers of a meaningful choice that would cut out an expensive middleman.

Without this policy, you might see lots of products on Amazon that are $19.99 with Amazon's 30% cut, and maybe $13.99 (30% less) on the vendor's own website. The consumer loses twice with Amazon's policy: once because they couldn't get the item at a cheaper price, and again because they didn't support any innovation or competition in the market, which would also lower prices.

binarysolo5• 3 months ago

Long-time Amazon seller/brand here, so here's the crux of the case:

1. Amazon is a search engine for product

2. It values being the cheapest destination for products (MFN most favored nation clause to sell on their website), and basically will suppress your listings from search if they can find you selling it cheaper elsewhere.

3. Amazon is def one of the more expensive ecom channels to sell, BUT they've got a huge audience as well due to decades of consumer-first policies, so sellers still go there because even if they have loyal customers with strong brand loyalty, you still end up with at least 30% of customers going to Amazon first after seeing your ads elsewhere + the lure of NTB new-to-brand customers you can acquire there.

So the crux of the case is dependent on whether they can do #2 with impunity -- which Amazon considers "consumer friendly" (but obviously it's win-win for them too).

mgiampapa• 3 months ago

I order from Amazon because of their logistics. For some reason Amazon can ship for free at the same price as the producer's Shopify page that wants to charge me insane shipping because I live in a remote location.

Yes, I understand the price fixing is why they aren't selling for less on their own site, but Amazon's superpower is logistics, not years of goodwill and brand loyalty.

binarysolo5• 3 months ago

I mean, 1-2 day shipping is a huge part of their consumer-first policy, which is why every seller has got to do FBA -- for the longest time until COVID, the algorithm heavily penalized FBM fulfilled by merchant from ranking in the search results.

Once FBA started failing during COVID due to warehouse restrictions + sellers and 3PL third party logistics centers really stepped up did FBM even become a thing (and Amazon smartly gave access to Prime badges for FBM sellers who could deal with stringent shipping times).

IMHO the other big superpower Amazon has is to force sellers to eat returns and provide retroactive refunds when a product gets recalled.

yencabulator• 3 months ago

Along that line: I know that Lowe's, Home Depot, Chewy etc ship to me with speed matching or beating Amazon's (at least above a minimum purchase), so if what I'm buying is sold by those companies, Amazon does not get that sale.

Amazon is hugely anti-competitive, but their moat can be surprisingly shallow in some areas.

What Amazon has shown the rest of the industry is that shipping matters. Others are learning, at their own pace.

m463• 3 months ago

Things I don't like about amazon:

- they take a huge cut, making them more expensive. I've heard some folks give 50% to amazon to sell stuff

- they destroy or drive away brands, so you cannot shop for quality

- "customers" are bombarded by ads. I think sponsored links seem to be close to 100% of results until you scroll down a few pages.

7777777phil• 3 months ago

MFN clauses are common in retail, what's different about Amazon's is the enforcement. Manufacturer MAP policies threaten "we won't ship you more," which you can recover from (unlike a listing demotion)

New unsealed records reveal Amazon's price-fixing tactics, California AG claims

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