The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has sued Amazon Australia for allegedly misrepresenting the costs of releasing ads but then avoiding them.
The ACCC website claims that from 2023 to 2025, Amazon price contracts were unfair, in that Amazon could make “unilateral negative changes” without any recourse to the customer. So when Amazon Prime dropped ads in 2024, the lawsuit said this version of the contract enabled Amazon to unfairly force ad-free customers into a more expensive tier if they wanted to remain ad-free.
The ACCC also claims that Amazon US “knowingly was concerned about Amazon AU’s conduct.”
Meanwhile, anonymous reports are strongly pointing towards a major case against Amazon’s Marketplace ads from the US Federal Trade Commission. That still-in-progress lawsuit, if genuine, would allege that Amazon makes its ad auctions deceptively opaque, keeps sellers unaware of how much competition there is for ad space on a search, and entices them to pay more than fair value for ads.
Amazon made $68 billion in advertising revenue last year.
According to last year’s MoffettNathanson report, the Big Five tech companies Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft and TikTok reportedly now earn two-thirds of all advertising revenue. According to Ad Age, in 2025, Amazon was also the world’s largest advertiser by amount spent.
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