No images? Click here Welcome to The Corner. In this issue, we explore new revelations about how Amazon’s internal ads business aims to deceive buyers and to hurt sellers on its marketplace. We also introduce our seminal report on how to save journalism from Google and Facebook’s destructive business models, which are designed to monopolize all advertising.
FTC Details How Amazon
The Federal Trade Commission last week released information that was previously redacted in the antitrust lawsuit it filed in September against Amazon. Perhaps most explosive new revelation is that Amazon’s exponential growth in advertising – which brought the company $38 billion in revenues last year – was based in large part on intentionally deceptive business practices designed to harm both consumers and third-party sellers. The allegations throw into doubt Amazon’s ability to continue to grow its advertising business, which has evolved from selling ads on its proprietary marketplace to other web publishers and smart TV providers. Indeed, if the FTC prevails in its case, Amazon will be prohibited from engaging in this conduct, and may be forced to shut down or spin off large parts of this
operation. The newly publicized portions of the lawsuit mainly recount Amazon’s advertising practices since 2014. In essence, the complaint shows that the core goal of this operation was to extract additional profits from its marketplace sellers, who were often all but required to buy advertising to at least break even. The extortionary nature of this model was first detailed by Open Markets’ executive director Barry Lynn in 2020. Amazon has been quietly but steadily growing its ads business since 2008. It started selling ads known as “sponsored products,” which appear within the search results of its marketplace. Around 2014, Amazon launched more ad formats, including “sponsored brands,” which are more flashy ads placed on top of supposedly “relevant Amazon shopping results.” According to
the FTC lawsuit, it was in 2016 that Jeff Bezos ordered executives to increase the number of irrelevant ads on the corporation’s marketplace purely to drive up profits. Such ads were known inside of Amazon as “defects,” and one result of their use was to degrade the user experience of Amazon customers. At the time
Bezos was Amazon’s CEO. He’s been the executive chair of the e-commerce giant since the summer of 2021. The change proved lucrative. Between 2016 and 2018, Amazon’s advertising revenue surged from $1.4 billion to an estimated $10 billion, according to Barclays and company records. This model soon attracted many copycats among other big retailers, who have followed the Amazon move to build its own digital advertising agency, in what marketers now
call “retail media networks.” Under this business model, retailers not only sell ads related to search queries on their websites, they promise targeting capabilities to reach specific shoppers across the web and connected devices. As reported in the Washington Monthly in July, it is this business model, founded on “sponsored product” ads, that catapulted Amazon into third place behind Google and Facebook in the market of “ad tech” tools. These services are commonly used by other web publishers, including news organizations, to connect with advertisers through a series of bids that auction ad spaces. Amazon, unlike any other retailer, directly operates an ad exchange that connects brands with web publishers. In this retail media network, advertisers seek to target Amazon users on
the marketplace and the web. Some marketers have portrayed such a model as a better way to spend money on digital ads compared to Google or social media, since the targeting is supposedly based on highly precise data about the shopping behavior of individual people. But a growing number of small businesses have started to report that investment in Amazon Ads — the commercial name of Amazon’s ad business — can be just as misleading. “Amazon Ads takes credit for sales that would have happened organically, like 40% [of organic sales], dramatically inflating performance [of ads],” wrote recently Bryan Porter, chief of e-commerce officer at drinkware company SimpleModern. “Lifetime, we’ve spent $14 million on Amazon ads. Our learning? Millions were a waste.”
The Center for Journalism and Liberty at the Open Markets Institute released a seminal report examining the breakdown of journalism's business model as Google and Facebook continue to starve new publishers of revenues and readers. Democracy, Journalism, and
Monopoly: How to Fund Independent News Media in the 21st Century attributes the crisis in journalism to wide-ranging policy failures over the last 40 years, including the abandonment of antitrust law. The good news? Governments around the world are already moving to restore fair competition on several fronts. These include major U.S. Justice Department lawsuits charging Google with monopolizing the digital advertising technologies market as well as the search space. Download the paper here. Meanwhile, a complementary paper from Open Markets senior legal analyst Daniel Hanley provides an expanded historical background by detailing how antimonopoly has long been a critical feature of U.S competition policy in the media, communications, and information industries. Read Hanley’s paper here.
The Open Markets Institute and the AI Now Institute will host a conference, “AI and the Public Interest,” on November 15 to discuss the promise, threats, and practical regulatory challenges we face in managing the advent of large scale AI. The event, to be held at the JW Marriott in Washington D.C., will examine AI in relation to the already existing powers, structures, and behaviors of the corporations that control these technologies and the computing systems on which they depend. The conference will also ask whether antitrust and other competition law and policy can play a role in protecting democracy, individual health and wellbeing, the properties of creators, and open and competitive innovation from AI-related threats. Speakers include Federal Trade Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya; Doha Mekki, Deputy Assistant General at the Department of Justice; Andreas Schwab, member of the European Parliament; Christy Hoffman, General Secretary of the UNI Global Union; antitrust scholar Tim Wu; and Rana Foroohar, Financial Times global business columnist. Check back for updates here.
The Open Markets Institute submitted a public comment to the U.S. Copyright Office to help provide clarity to the public concerning the application of copyright law to generative artificial intelligence (GAI). The comment considers the fundamental power disparities between journalists, artists, and other creators against Big Tech’s GAI applications and lays out a simple list of policy proposals to ensure copyright law is applied in the public interest. “Enforcing copyright laws and requiring companies to meet their legal obligations — whether that is compensating rights holders or ensuring transparency of training data — are critical in order to protect human creativity and reward the labor that goes into it,” the comment reads. Read the full comment here. 📝 WHAT WE'VE BEEN UP TO:
🔊 ANTI-MONOPOLY RISING:
We appreciate your readership. Please consider making a contribution to support the continued publication of this newsletter. 📈 VITAL STAT:$1.8 BillionThe amount the powerful National Association of Realtors was ordered to pay after a jury ruled that it conspired with large brokers to inflate commissions on home sales. The ruling, which will be likely be appealed, would upend the American real estate industry. (New York Times) 📚 WHAT WE'RE READING:When McKinsey Comes to Town: Veteran investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe pull back the curtain on powerhouse global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. In their harrowing account, Bogdanich and Forsythe explore how the firm’s cutthroat ideology and market-distorting tactics have shaped the practices of the world’s largest corporations and most powerful governments for decades — at the expense of workers and consumers everywhere. 🔎 TIPS? COMMENTS? SUGGESTIONS? We would love to hear from you—just reply to this e-mail and drop us a line. Give us your feedback, alert us to competition policy news, or let us know your favorite story from this issue. |