The FTC must force Amazon to end its rigged auctions for the 22 states
By Alma Cordero · Reporting from El Paso ·
It always comes down to the same story, doesn't it?
The Invisible Hand That Rigged the Auction House
The story always repeats itself. A system promises transparency—a marketplace where the small seller finally gains visibility, where they sell their handmade goods or niche software—and then it reveals itself as a rigged shell game. This isn't bad business; this is structural theft. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 22 state attorneys general charge Amazon with systematically overcharging advertisers by manipulating the very mechanics of its digital auctions. They allege, with specificity detailed by both CNBC and NPR, that since changes to auction rules took effect around 2019, Amazon secretly inflated prices through undisclosed surcharges—a "soft reserve price"—that ensnared over 1.2 million brands and sellers. The numbers expose the full scope of the fraud: the FTC claims these practices allowed Amazon to pocket tens of billions of dollars, potentially exceeding $20 billion, all at the expense of its own advertising customers. When a corporation builds an economy on the backs of small businesses—the local artisan in Segundo Barrio, the family running a corner store—and then charges them for the mere privilege of participation using hidden fees and opaque rules, that constitutes nothing less than extraction.
The Illusion of Competition and Fair Play
Amazon defends itself by deploying common-sense rhetoric: they claim the FTC's lawsuit "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate" and point to supposed savings of $8 billion between 2021 and 2025. They attempt to derail the conversation with talk of consumer prices or improved quality, but we must focus on the mechanism of profit here. The core accusation—and it stands as a powerful indictment—is that Amazon changed its auction rules without warning, manufacturing an invented participant solely to artificially inflate bids. This transcends mere aggressive pricing; this represents engineered deception executed on a massive scale.
This pattern echoes through history, revealing nothing new about the appetite for unchecked power. We have witnessed this before: Google’s dominance in search faced antitrust challenges over its manipulation of results and market access. Consider the Volkswagen emissions scandal, where systemic deception—the programming of engines to cheat regulations—demanded massive regulatory intervention from multiple government levels. The pattern remains starkly clear: when a single entity controls the infrastructure of modern life, it inevitably learns how to wield that control not for efficiency, but for profit through deliberate obfuscation.
When Monopoly Becomes Standard Oil Trust
The true weight of this lawsuit lies in its structural parallel. What Amazon executed—the consolidation of diverse market competitors into an artificial monopoly structure requiring external regulatory intervention to restore genuine competitive balance—mirrors the mechanism that birthed the Standard Oil Trust. That trust, formed by pooling securities and managed by trustees, only dissolved by order of the Supreme Court, reorganized into independent companies. The shared principle is not surface resemblance; it is the systemic capture of market power under a single corporate umbrella to annihilate genuine competition.
The sheer scale of this alleged overcharging forces us to recall other historical abuses: how millions of personal data points leaked without informed consent by Cambridge Analytica, or how prescription drug prices maintain among the highest in the world, suggesting collusion rather than competitive pricing. These are not isolated incidents; they form a long record detailing corporate behavior that treats public infrastructure—whether it is the internet, clean air, or basic healthcare—as nothing more than an unregulated revenue stream ripe for exploitation.
The law must recognize this pattern. Amazon cannot simply evade accountability by acting as another retailer with occasional pricing mistakes. It operates as a platform that built its empire on systematically rigging auctions and deliberately obscuring costs from the very people it claims to serve. The current lawsuit, joined by 22 states, does not merely concern ad dollars; it demands the restoration of the fundamental promise of American capitalism: that the market, when left alone, must remain competitive and fair.
The verdict must declare Amazon's practices a clear violation of consumer protection laws—a calculated abuse of monopoly power. Regulatory bodies must move beyond calculating mere restitution for advertisers and instead mandate structural changes to its core auction mechanisms. The goal cannot simply be fines; it must force the re-establishment of genuine, transparent competition so that the platform becomes what it purports to be: a shared economy, not a private vault.