By Ece Yildirim
The Federal Trade Commission is taking Amazon to court this week over the tech giant’s moneymaker Prime subscription program.
In a trial set to last for the next month, FTC is claiming that Amazon tricked millions of customers into signing up for a Prime membership and then made it very tough to cancel said subscription.
“Millions of consumers accidentally enrolled in Prime without knowledge or consent, but Amazon refused to fix this known problem, described internally by employees as an ‘unspoken cancer’ because clarity adjustments would lead to a drop in subscribers,” the FTC wrote in a court filing from earlier this month.
“Similarly, Prime’s cancellation flow, known internally as “Iliad,” is a labyrinthian mechanism that Defendants know deters consumers from cancelling or misleads consumers into believing they successfully cancelled Prime when they in fact did not,” the FTC said.
The lawsuit was filed two years ago under Biden-era FTC, then led by big tech hawk Lina Khan. It is going to be Amazon’s first major showdown with the FTC, but there is a second one already on the horizon. The FTC separately delivered its first set of antitrust charges to Amazon two years ago, and the trial for that is set to start in early 2027.
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