Technology

Amazon didn’t block the ads for Apple, they allowed Apple to buy all of the ad space on their product page so they could decide what went there in order to combat counterfeit products and accessories from showing up— a big problem on Amazon. The question isn’t, “why is Apple allowed to do this?” The question is, “why isn’t everyone allowed to do this?” All companies should have the ability to do this, not just a few, and people should be upset with Amazon, not Apple, for cutting off everyone from being able to buy out the ad space on their own product pages.

And then there’s Amazon’s massive problem with counterfeit products which is what caused Apple to demand control of the ads on its product page in the first place.

This basically happens with every retailer. Online or brick and mortar. Been happening since the 80’s.

Retailers use store location and proximity to other products to make money and woo manufacturers / CPGs.

Amazon is basically just doing exactly what Best Buy or your local grocery store has been doing for decades.

The Insider blocked Lemmy user's from reading this article unless they pony up to get through their paywall

This is the best summary I could come up with:

In its recent lawsuit against Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company and former CEO Jeff Bezos of flooding the e-commerce site with irrelevant "junk ads" to boost profit.

The unusual arrangement follows the iPhone-maker's private demands to Amazon to only show its products in results when an Apple term like "iPad" is searched, according to an internal email previously shared by the House Judiciary Committee.

"We understand that Apple does not want to drive sales to competing brands in search or detail pages," Amazon's retail CEO at the time, Jeff Wilke, wrote in the email.

Back in 2018, Amazon appears to have initially refused Apple's request, but left open the possibility of working out a financial arrangement, according to the email shared by the House Judiciary Committee.

Large advertisers on Amazon constantly ask for this type of exclusivity, but the company usually denies those requests because it wants a diverse set of search results and ads, one of the people said.

The special treatment given to Apple is very different from Amazon's broader mandate to accept more ads on its marketplace, even if that hurts the customer experience, a practice alleged in detail in the FTC's filing last week.

The original article contains 1,512 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 87%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

https://archive.is/YmlLB

Google was up to this too, ayeeee

Jedi Blue is their name for it