amazon4 articles
FTC Sues Amazon Over Secret Ad Auction Rigging Worth $20 Billion
The FTC, joined by 22 state attorneys general, has sued Amazon for allegedly running a secret scheme since 2019 to manipulate its advertising auctions, causing approximately 1.2 million advertisers to overpay by more than $20 billion. The lawsuit claims Amazon covertly imposed hidden surcharges on top of standard auction results, overriding the competitive "second price" auction system it publicly advertised, while keeping even its own sales staff unaware of the practice. Amazon has denied wrongdoing, arguing its reserve pricing system reflects true market value, that average ad costs remained flat when adjusted for inflation, and that the FTC selectively used a small number of internal documents to misrepresent its practices.
AWS Billing Console Loses the Plot, Tells Users They Owe Trillions
A software bug in AWS's billing system caused wildly inflated cost estimates to be displayed in the Cost Explorer console, with some users receiving estimates in the billions or even trillions of dollars despite negligible actual usage. AWS confirmed the figures were inaccurate and did not reflect real charges, pausing further estimate updates while investigating the issue. The company identified and mitigated the root cause and expected corrected billing figures to be restored for all customers by noon Pacific time on Saturday, July 18.
Amazon Mechanical Turk Is Being Put Out to Pasture
Amazon Web Services has announced it will stop accepting new customers for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform, with the service closing to new users from July 30, 2026, signalling the eventual retirement of one of the internet's earliest crowdsourcing marketplaces. Launched in 2005, Mechanical Turk allowed users to post tasks for remote workers to complete, and later found a use case in human-reviewed data annotation for AI training. Amazon has not given an official reason for the wind-down, though it has developed competing services such as SageMaker GroundTruth, and reports suggest the platform has been in decline for some time.
Big Four Consultancies All in Disgrace, Cyborg Cockroaches Can Now Scuba Dive: Asia Pacific Roundup
EY fired two employees after they allegedly accessed Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's bank account details while working on a contract for Commonwealth Bank. The incident adds EY to a growing list of Big Four consultancies facing scandals in Australia, alongside KPMG, Deloitte, and PwC, which have all faced separate controversies involving misuse of confidential information. How the pair were able to access such sensitive data has not been explained by the bank.