"Since 2019, Amazon.com has secretly and systematically overcharged its approximately 1.2 million advertising customers by manipulating the “auctions” that it uses to set the price of ads on its platform," according to the lawsuit.
Page F6From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
FTC and 22 states say Amazon hid an ad surcharge scheme that cheated advertisers out of billions.
As it ran on the front
The Federal Trade Commission and twenty-two state attorneys general filed suit this week against Amazon, alleging the company built an undisclosed surcharge into its advertising rates. A separate suit puts a number on it: billions of dollars, extracted from advertisers who believed they were paying a market price for a market service.
This office ran the filing against the rate card. The rate card says one number. The invoice says another. The difference between those two numbers is the surcharge, and the surcharge does not appear on the rate card. That is not a rounding error. That is the entire complaint.…
…(cont) Twenty-two states signed on. That is not a partisan filing — that is a bipartisan accounting problem. When twenty-two attorneys general agree a company's invoice does not match its rate card, the company does not have a messaging problem. It has a ledger problem, and the ledger problem has a dollar sign in front of it.
Advertisers paid for placement. They were billed for placement plus something else. The something else was not named on the bill. It was, per the complaint, engineered not to be named — a markup built to be invisible to the party paying it, visible only to the party collecting it. That is not innovation. That is a toll booth with the toll sign removed after the car has already gone through.
The company's public defense, so far, has been standard: dynamic pricing, market mechanics, nothing to disclose that isn't already disclosed. This office notes that a mechanism engineered to be undisclosed does not become disclosed by being described, after the fact, as mechanical.
Billions, the suit says. Not millions — billions, with a b, extracted a few cents at a time from every small business that bought an ad believing the price on the screen was the price. The gap did not appear in Amazon's column. It appeared in the advertiser's, hon, and it appeared there every single time.
In lieu of a rate-card correction, the FTC and twenty-two states are proposing a courtroom. That's one way to reconcile a book that doesn't balance.
“You thought you were paying market rate for that ad, and it turns out Amazon built a private toll booth into the price and never posted the sign. Twenty-two states and the FTC just read the meter out loud, and the number wasn't small. That's not a fee, that's a tax you didn't vote for, collected by a company you can't avoid.”
“This is a pricing dispute, not a cover-up — Amazon's ad platform has always used dynamic auction mechanics reflecting real-time market conditions. Any characterization of a 'secret surcharge' misunderstands standard programmatic ad tech. Did I say it was standard? That's not — the states filed suit because it was standard, that's the problem.”
The receipts
Regulators allege that sellers and brands were overcharged by tens of billions of dollars through secretly inflated ad prices.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.