The U.S. vs Amazon Prime
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 23 June 2023
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Wednesday, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, accusing the online giant of “tricking and trapping people into recurring subscriptions.” The complaint says Amazon “knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime."
With murmurs of a larger antitrust probe against Amazon just around the corner, how serious is this suit for the tech giant?
Guest: Leah Nylen, antitrust reporter at Bloomberg
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What do you go ahead and tell me who you are and what you do? |
| 0:07.6 | Yeah, I'm Lee and Ilyn. I'm Bloomberg's antitrust reporter. |
| 0:12.4 | How many times a day do you think about Amazon? |
| 0:15.7 | Probably, I mean, at least once, sometimes many times a day. |
| 0:21.3 | How many times a day do you think Lena Khan thinks about Amazon? |
| 0:25.8 | Oh my God, probably a lot more than me. |
| 0:28.8 | I mean, they have a lot about Amazon going on over there. |
| 0:36.6 | I called Leah because this week, the Federal Trade Commission, |
| 0:40.1 | which Lena Khan chairs, sued Amazon, saying the company tricked people into signing up |
| 0:46.2 | for its premium service prime and deliberately made it hard for them to cancel. |
| 0:52.0 | But the thing is, this is not the first fight between Lena Khan and Amazon. |
| 0:56.6 | It's not even the fifth. Khan's focus on the company goes back before she even came to the FTC, |
| 1:03.9 | back to her time as a student at Yale Law School. |
| 1:07.7 | I mean, after all, this is this is a woman who wrote a pretty famous or maybe we should say famous |
| 1:12.9 | in antitrust circles, a law review paper about Amazon. I'm like, I just wonder, |
| 1:19.0 | is someone from her brain always occupied with Amazon? |
| 1:23.4 | I mean, I sort of hope not for her because like giving them that much of her brain space, |
| 1:28.7 | but I mean, I guess, you know, from her point of view, it's all about like rating antitrust on, so. |
| 1:35.4 | And would you say that this week she rained it in a little or a lot? |
| 1:42.5 | Well, they certainly love the big bomb of them. |
| 1:46.0 | This is probably the biggest case that has been filed against Amazon today. |
| 1:51.6 | Because it takes aim at, you know, their most lucrative business, which is their marketplace. |
... |
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