The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJ reports, citing agency officials.
According to the report:
The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.
The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ
Amazon's digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet's Google and Meta - earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report - which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back.
Shares shot sharply lower on the news.
Every time a shopper searches for a product on Amazon, merchants compete to offer different types of ads to get in front of consumers. According to the FTC, Amazon began changing its ad auction strategy in 2018 - raising prices on advertisers in a way they wouldn't notice.
The way this worked was through a mechanism called a "soft reserve":
The company had historically run a special type of auction, popular in Silicon Valley, designed to attract more bids and protect winners from dramatically overpaying. That formula tended to reduce the price a merchant paid to advertise.
To raise the price, Amazon began entering its own bid, known as a “soft reserve,” which was higher than the price of the runner-up bidder, the FTC will allege. Under the rules of the auction, that raised the price paid for an ad. Amazon knew the merchants’ competing bids and didn’t disclose its new practice, officials said.
Amazon’s ad executives tracked the “surcharge” they earned from the strategy and sought to limit how much others knew about it, FTC officials said. The executives initially deployed the strategy only on popular shopping days when companies would think higher ad rates resulted from intense competition for shoppers’ attention, the officials said. -WSJ
According to the FTC, Amazon's goal was to capture more of the value of each retail sale connected to a successful ad - in recent years intervening in auctions to raise the minimum price 70% - 80% of the time.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:20As the world marches towards open-weight, efficient, unrestricted frontier AI models out of China, Western leaders are starting to panic over the lack of guardrails. Most recently, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey suggested that the threat posed by AI could lead to a chaotic correction in global financial markets, as frontier models are now showing "increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities."
Governor of the Bank of England Andrew Bailey addresses the media during a press conference concerning interest rates, at the Bank of England, in London, Britain, November 2, 2023. HENRY NICHOLLS/Pool via REUTERS"Financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, and technology providers will therefore need to strengthen vulnerability management, response and recovery capabilities, and prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruption across multiple firms or shared technology dependencies," Bailey wrote in a two-page letter published Monday to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in his capacity as chair of the Financial Stability Board - an international body that coordinates international policy and provides recommendations to national authorities.
Bailey says the cyber risk posed by AI is "the most immediate concern" for the global financial system.
"Frontier AI may have the ability materially to alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers," he wrote, adding. "Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond."
Bailey's warning comes one month after the Bank for International Settlements warned that the AI bubble itself is one of three of the most alarming threats to global prosperity at this time.
"Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions," the BIS said, before observing that "a major equity-market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences today than in the past."
Officials highlighted vulnerabilities linked to funding, including complex arrangements such so-called “circular financing” deals that can mix equity and debt with supplier-client contracts (as discussed here "The $1.8 Trillion Off-Balance Sheet Time Bomb At The Heart Of The AI Supercycle").
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 14:15Authored by Tom Gantert via The Epoch Times,
Google Maps has updated its site to include Lake America in place of Lake Ontario, following the direction of President Donald Trump's executive order renaming the Great Lake.
"It's official! LAKE AMERICA on Google Maps," Steven Cheung, assistant to the president and White House director of communications, posted on X on Aug. 30.
It’s official! LAKE AMERICA on Google Maps. pic.twitter.com/CotsXetERJ
— Steven Cheung (@StevenCheung47) August 30, 2026Google released a statement on the changing of the name of the body of water.
"The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for 'Lake Ontario' to 'Lake America' in the United States," the company said.
Since it updates Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, people using the application in the United States will see "Lake America," Google said.
In Canada, users of Google Maps will continue to see "Lake Ontario," and those outside of the two countries will see both names, the statement reads.
Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27 directing the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update federal records to identify Lake Ontario as Lake America.
The president said the change recognizes the United States' role in protecting and maintaining the Great Lakes. The order cites nearly $4 billion in U.S. spending on the Great Lakes ecosystem during the past decade and said the U.S. Coast Guard operates nine of the 11 icebreaking vessels serving the lakes.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the change, saying that Canadians would continue calling it Lake Ontario. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has also said the state will retain the lake's traditional name.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced on May 9 that her government had sued Google over the company's decision to label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America after Trump changed the name of that body of water.
Google made the change for U.S. users after Trump's executive order directed the federal government to adopt the new name. Users in Mexico continued to see the Gulf of Mexico, while users elsewhere saw both names.
Sheinbaum had threatened legal action in February, arguing that the United States could rename only the portion of the gulf under its jurisdiction, not the body of water. She disclosed the lawsuit during her briefing but provided no details about where it was filed or what relief Mexico was seeking.
Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 13:40