Unsubscribe: Amazon on trial over FTC claims of Prime trickery

SEATTLE (CN) — On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission made its opening argument that Amazon Prime is a service that offers fast shipping, streaming services and surprise billing.

Trick and trap

In U.S. District Judge John Chun’s packed courtroom, the FTC told the jury that Amazon and its officers — Neil Lindsay, Russell Grandinetti and Jamil Ghani — desperately wanted more Prime members, so they enrolled unaware consumers in subscriptions that Amazon made difficult to cancel in violation of the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act.

“Amazon knowingly intended to trick consumers into Prime subscriptions without their consent and trapped their consumers by making it difficult to cancel,” said FTC attorney Jonathan Cohen. “The obsession was with the number of customers, not about treating them right.”

The FTC presented slides of Amazon webpages that asked non-Prime consumers for their billing information before displaying the message, “Good news, we’re giving you a 30-day FREE trial of Prime,” without showing Prime’s cost or autorenewal feature.

The FTC said Amazon then forced consumers to either sign up for Prime without material information to buy their item or reject Prime and abandon their purchase. If a consumer chose the latter, Amazon used their billing information to enroll them anyway.

Then, the FTC said, Amazon kept consumers in a labyrinthine cancellation flow called the “Iliad,” referencing Homer’s epic about the Trojan War, though Amazon’s Iliad either deterred consumers from canceling Prime or made them think they did.

“The case we bring you today is about one of the world’s largest subscription services and one of the world’s largest companies acting like they are above the law,” said Cohen.

Clear and conspicuous

In its opening argument, Amazon argued the FTC cherry-picked sentences from extensive memos about an issue Amazon and its officers genuinely tried to fix and that none of the officers worked at Prime in 2014, which is when the FTC said Amazon began violating ROSCA.

Amazon attorney Moez Kaba of Hueston Hennigan said the company has no need to trick people into signing up for Prime because the company invested billions of dollars to make Prime one of the most trusted and valued subscription services in the U.S.

The company said it gave consumers clear and conspicuous terms for joining Prime by referencing the service and its price multiple times on the website and that the FTC’s interpretation of ROSCA is too vague to establish how Amazon violated it.

“It’s like ticketing someone for speeding when the law just says, ‘Drive reasonably,’” said Kaba.

Turning to the FTC’s expert Reid Nelson, a user experience researcher who worked for Amazon for 10 years, Kaba quoted him as saying of his time with Amazon, “We go beyond what is legally required in customer service.”

“This is not a shadowy gimmick that Amazon wants to trap customers in,” said Kaba. “Amazon doesn’t want people to sign up for Prime unless they want to.”

Two accepts, one decline

On the stand, Nelson testified that he and his team analyzed customer experience videos from countries where Amazon processes are similar to the U.S., and those users had difficulties declining or canceling Prime enrollments, including one user who had to click the cancel button four times to complete the process.

Also, the enrollment offer page presented a button on top as accept and a button on the bottom that looked like a decline button, but those two were the accept options, while the decline option was to the left and less highlighted.

Upon ending the session, Chun thanked the legal team members who managed both parties’ slides and called for recess, with the next hearing of the trial set for Wednesday.

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