More than half the country has Amazon Prime. The FTC is worried they’ve been “tricked and trapped.”
As of March, there are 167 million Americans who have Prime. It is approximately 64 percent of all individuals in America over the age of 18. In about 70 percent of households in the U.S., someone has a Prime account. So, Prime is a really big driver of Amazon’s business, since most of the money it makes is from the marketplace—selling things online is what it’s known for.
Prime had been growing for a significant amount of time. In 2020, for example, it was only something like 50 percent of 18-plus individuals in the U.S. had Prime. So they’ve made some significant headway over the past couple years—particularly because of the pandemic, everybody wanted things at home. But then they boosted the price. It used to be $119.
The same day that the FTC brought that [suit], they also brought another one about the Ring doorbell. Ring is a company that Amazon bought, and a lot of the bad behavior that the FTC alleged happened before Amazon bought Ring. But they said that Ring didn’t really have great privacy practices, so much so that it was pretty easy for hackers to hack those doorbells and then spy on users.
Are these medium-sized cases where the FTC thinks it can get a win, or is this all part of the much larger probe at Amazon?You could see this as the FTC steadily building up to its big antitrust case. It’s found a bunch of bad practices in different divisions within Amazon, but it’s building up to this big monopolization case against the company.
Other people who are more pro-Amazon say that the FTC is harassing them by just nipping at their heels with all these little lawsuits. Amazon did agree to settle the other two—it says it didn’t think it did anything wrong but it wanted to get rid of them. The Prime lawsuit it intends to fight.Related from Slate
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