14 ms·

Apple asked Amazon to block rival ads

206 points by acecreamu 3y ago

38 3y ago
> As detailed by today’s report, the agreement between Apple and Amazon includes a carveout that reduces the number of ads and recommendations that appear on product pages for Apple devices. While Amazon product pages are generally full of ads, sponsored results, and recommendations, Apple’s product pages show only one banner ad at the very bottom of the page. > In contrast, product pages for Apple competitors like Samsung are riddled with ads from competitors, recommendations, and other sponsored banners. Insider says that other companies, including Samsung, have complained about the preferential treatment given to Apple.
CSMastermind 3y ago
It sounds like Apple was upset about the counterfeit products being sold on Amazon and, after issuing hundreds of thousands of takedown notices threatened to sue Amazon themselves and reached an agreement where Amazon took measures to eliminate the counterfeits. The knock seems to be that they only did this for Apple products, not counterfeits of say Samsung phones because they were not pressured in similar ways by Samsung.
- jtbayly 3y ago
  I didn't read the whole article, but it seemed focused on (missing) advertisements, not on counterfeits.
  - nemo 3y ago
    The advertisements were what was driving the counterfeiting. It was by giving Apple a page without third parties injecting ads into it that they handled the counterfeiting issue.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    > I didn't read the whole article That's rectifiable.
    - robwwilliams 3y ago
      Great response!
      - QuantumGood 3y ago
        itsrectifiable.com is available.
        twothamendment 3y ago
        Was available... For the right price, it is rectifiable.
        CoastalCoder 3y ago
        I really, really hope it's bought by an analog electronics manufacturer.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - neogodless 3y ago
    It's both. > In a statement today, Apple explained: > > Apple also told Insider that the 2018 agreement with Amazon “sought to address significant counterfeit and safety issues” on Amazon’s marketplace.
- QwertyPi 3y ago
  Ok, there are two issues here: 1. Amazon refuses to hold themselves accountable for the products they sell—they advertise one thing but sell you another, clearly indicating they have no idea what they're actually selling. 2. Apple relies on legal protections to artificially inflate the pricing of their products. AirPods aren't much better than bluetooth headphones sold for a tenth the price, and they are straight-up inferior to the products of competitors with a third their price. If the superiority of their own products were so obvious the branding wouldn't be an issue at all. And don't even get me started on how they force consumers to buy their hardware to get access to their software, which should be forced to be sold on the open market along side their competitors. Now of course we need to fix the first issue to fix the second one, but the second issue has far more destructive consequences.
  - DueDilligence 3y ago
    [dead]
  - 93po 3y ago
    I don't know of any third party options to Airpods that: 1. pair instantly without problems to my apple devices 2. intelligently know when to switch between my phone to my laptop 3. intelligently know when to switch from car bluetooth to headphones 4. is compatible with "Find My" 5. has magsafe charging 6. has same sound quality and sound cancellation with above features these are all very important to me and my experience with literally any other non-apple device has been awful
    - seec 3y ago
      Those "features" are arbitrary stuff Apple told you to care about through their marketing. Many people really don't care about them, because outside the Apple ecosystem, there are other, often better solutions. The auto switching never worked properly for me so I'm always curious how come all Apple fanboys have it working so well. In my opinion it's like the Siri "demo" I got back in the day where the thing supposedly working so well, completely, and utterly failed, yet my Apple fan friend acted like everything worked fine. I have non-Apple Bluetooth earbuds and they pair simply fine to my Apple devices (and others). Apple oversell the shit of their iCloud "auto switching" (that often do not work) but what you actually want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many headphones in the price range of Airpods have. Find my and MagSafe charging are very odd, Apple marketing induced request, and Apple definitely doesn't have a lead in sound quality at the price they sell their stuff. If anything, their sound quality is extremely disappointing considering the price. Funny thing is that for the price of a set of Airpods, you can get 2-3 equivalent competitors' products. So much of the stuff you say matters is largely irrelevant. Before calling me a hater: I'm an Apple customer since the PPC days and bought both first iPod and first iPhone. But I am currently leaving the Apple ecosystem precisely because their pricing is not grounded in any technological reality, and mostly about fashion/social statuts.
DueDilligence 3y ago
[dead]
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
What exactly is the consumer harm here supposed to be?
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
  Were I Samsung, I would be pissed that competitor’s (cheaper) products get shown on my page. As a consumer, it shows that Amazon is aware of counterfeits, and has the ability to limit them, but does nothing unless the seller can raise an appropriate fit. Have I previously purchased counterfeit Samsung X? Sounds like Amazon might have a good intuition, but does nothing to stop it.
  - gwern 3y ago
    Were you Samsung, one would hope you would be more pissed about your crummy software and ecosystem where $900 smartphones are jammed full of ads and fourth-rate buggy plagiarisms of better Google/Apple services, and understand why better companies than you can negotiate better treatment than you.
- viknesh 3y ago
  I think you could argue something like "Amazon is aware that it's ads broadly promote counterfeits but leave them up"
tracerbulletx 3y ago
Retailer and vendor make a contractual deal to merchandise product. Is your grocery store colluding with CocaCola to display their products right at the front of the store while putting healthy items like milk far away!!?? Are they harming the health of your children?? Is this just a conspiracy to make greedy dentists richer?? More news at 11
- iris2004 3y ago
  Amazon is both a retailer and marketplace. If it prevents fake Coke being sold because of a secret deal, but is happy to sell fake Pepsi, then that is absolutely a problem for both consumers and sellers which should be scrutinised, especially considering its position in the market.
- hedora 3y ago
  > Is your grocery store colluding with CocaCola to display their products right at the front of the store while putting healthy items like milk far away!!?? Of course they are. I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but Coca Cola exists precisely because of those sorts of distribution and product placement deals. Grocery stores are paid a ton of money to place products in favorable spots on the shelves and end caps. That and the consumer surveillance loyalty cards are a huge fraction of their profits. (I’d ban both practices if I were supreme dictator. Sadly, I am not.)
qgin 3y ago
How is this any different than Apple having its own wood-and-steel display area in Best Buy?
- lucb1e 3y ago
  I guess in a real store, you can see that it's there, and so any competitor knows this is something the store does and a deal they can get as well?
- microtherion 3y ago
  Yes, the very reason for Apple to create the "store-in-store" concept was that they thought that the buying experience for their products was inadequate (both in presentation of the products and qualification of the staff): https://web.archive.org/web/19990210163227/http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1998/q1/971104.pr.rel.compusa.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990210163227/http://product.in... The Amazon storefront simply seems to be an extension of that concept from brick and mortar to online stores. I'm not sure what's supposed to be unlawful or unethical about this. [Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but not in a retail oriented role, nor as a spokesperson]
  - kube-system 3y ago
    I think the difference is that Best Buy retail stores are not a marketplace, there are no third-party sellers in a Best Buy.
    - sib 3y ago
      In fact, there are, as in much of Big Box retail.
      - kube-system 3y ago
        There's store-within-a-store, but it's not really the same thing as a marketplace, and not the type of thing where any provider dominates the market enough to have a monopolistic power on it.
echelon 3y ago
> In contrast, product pages for Apple competitors like Samsung are riddled with ads from competitors, recommendations, and other sponsored banners. Insider says that other companies, including Samsung, have complained about the preferential treatment given to Apple. You shouldn't be allowed to place ads against another company's product listings or trademarked brands. You shouldn't be able to pay Google to advertise and gain search placement ahead of another company's trademarked brands, either.
- neogodless 3y ago
  That is the grand philosophical question. Should companies be able to do this? Is Amazon a marketplace, or the marketplace? Rewind 15 years ago, and I compared local retail, Amazon, NewEgg, Buy.com, etc. I researched each product, and then researched which site would give me a good price plus shipping. Of course Amazon won this battle and edged out many competitors. But most people tend to go to Amazon, and let Amazon make decisions for them. That's kind of our own fault, but it's also worrying. Now I won't argue that Apple is or isn't the best maker of whatever product someone went to Amazon to shop for. But I still would like the products to be presented equally and fairly. But... I suppose I want companies to be able to give each other money to get different levels of service, too. How do you draw this line?
- smoldesu 3y ago
  So if I search Amazon for "Tylenol", you're saying the experience is better if they don't show me bulk acetaminophen? Or, is the damage to Tylenol just too great to offer people an alternative? I'm not really sure what your point is here. What's wrong with comparing products across brands?
- toast0 3y ago
  Why not? As long as it's not deceptive, seems ok to me. Trademarks don't mean absolute ownership of a word. I'm not a huge fan of advertising in retail, but even in offline retail, manufacturers/distributors are paying for shelf space, either directly in dollars or offset from the product cost / managed through other terms. Having your product accessory or competitor shelved nearby a more well known product is helpful; ads in a retail website are analogous to that.
pimlottc 3y ago
While I get the principle at play here, it’s pretty hard to get mad at Apple for getting Amazon to show fewer ads.
wnevets 3y ago
Amazon knows all about of the garbage being sold on its site but only does something about it if you're a massive tech company who threatens to sue, very cool. I wonder how many of these thumb drives are legit. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L13&sprefix=2+tb+thumb+driv%2Caps%2C71 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L1...
- neilv 3y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMBX671V/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMBX671V/ I wonder whether they used Samsung's factory tooling for that.
- malfist 3y ago
  Amazon makes money from those garbage companies having an ad war over who gets to deceive the eyeballs of Amazon's customers first, and then takes a cut when it gets sold. Customer Obsession and Earns Trust might be two of Amazon's Leadership Principles, but no principles stand in the way of cold hard cash.
  - LaundroMat 3y ago
    My dad used to say principles are like farts. You can only hold them for so long.
  - StressedDev 3y ago
    I agree with you about Amazon's leadership principals. It's clear that the retail side of Amazon regularly ignores them. My favorite example of this was I was browsing the "top 50" computer science books on Amazon. This was about 10 years ago. In the top 50, they had basic how to books (like how to use Linux or Excel), books on getting coding jobs, etc. They had almost no actual computer science books and yet, the top 50 list software almost certainly created by people with a computer science degrees!! The list even listed the same title more than once in a few cases. It was obvious that the software which built the list was broken and either had not been tested or was deployed in a known broken state. Customer obsession does not mean shipping obviously broken software which does not help the customer. As for trust, when I canceled Prime, Amazon used dark patterns to make the process as painful as possible. Not much to say other than I do not trust companies which try to trick me into not canceling a subscription I do not want.
jrockway 3y ago
I had no idea Apple got preferential treatment. I have never seen what I thought to be a genuine Apple product on Amazon. I assumed Apple was taking steps to prevent anyone from selling anything Apple-branded there. The fact that they're doing the opposite is just crazy to me. I looked more closely and they don't seem to sell iPhones, which is I guess where I get the impression from. Their other items have weird prices that are different from the Apple Store, which also screamed "scam" to me. But I guess not?
- neogodless 3y ago
  amazon.com/apple forwards me to https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/77D9E1F7-0337-4282-9DB6-B6B8FB2DC98D https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/77D9E1F7-0337-4282-9DB6-B... The Apple storefront. Lots of macbooks and watches to buy. Oddly enough, the iPhone only shows up in searches as used/renewed items, not brand new. Is that an Amazon thing or an Apple thing?
  - jrockway 3y ago
    Yeah, I clicked that link in the article and was surprised. I had never seen it before, but I guess I just assumed given how often-counterfeited anything Apple is, that it's something I'd never look for on Ali... em... Amazon. Meanwhile, ordering something from the Apple Store is super simple (since I have many nearby), and you know that the Apple Store isn't going to be selling counterfeit Apple products.
  - deelowe 3y ago
    Might be a carrier thing.
alberth 3y ago
Dumb question: why is this not allowed? Presumably, Apple paid Amazon to reduce the number of ads. What's so wrong about that? All companies allow large enterprise customers (who drive high revenue), to have custom / tailored offerings based on their requests.
- neogodless 3y ago
  It's allowed. The word in the article was scrutiny. The law suit is not about the ads, per se. It's about price-fixing, which you can probably agree should not be allowed.
- kube-system 3y ago
  When a company controls a large part of a market, regulators give extra scrutiny to any efforts that company may make that harms competition.
  - scarface_74 3y ago
    You mean 36% of e-commerce and an even smaller portion of all retail?
    - kube-system 3y ago
      Yes, 36% (I believe it's actually 37.6%) of e-commerce is a large portion. It is 587% larger than the second place competitor.
      - scarface_74 3y ago
        Yes because Amazon used unfair practices to crush small competitors like Walmart…
        kube-system 3y ago
        No, I don't think I've seen that being claimed. It has been claimed that they have used their anticompetitive practices against others. Having Walmart as a competitor doesn't mean that they don't have a dominant market position with power to abuse at their disposal.
karaterobot 3y ago
If it's true they colluded to remove ads from Apple pages on Amazon, both companies deserve what they get. Why do it sneakily? Why not have a page somewhere on Amazon that says "hey, if you want us to remove ads from your product listings, pay us [10x the total lifetime amount we expect to get in ad revenue from running ads on the page] per product page". Most companies wouldn't do it, so it wouldn't change Amazon's model much at all. Meanwhile, Apple could afford it trivially. While sleazy, it would be a completely legal offering that would never come back to bite them in the butt.
- ribosometronome 3y ago
  It sounds like you are saying that businesses should only be able to sell services that they publicly advertise with prices. For example, if Coca Cola wanted to have a product placement idk the eventual Jok3r movie, would Warner Brothers would need to advertise that service somewhere on the website? Would you see Coca Cola's advertising department calling WB and being "yo, what do we have to do to get poison ivy to have a fridge full of Coca Cola?" be sneaky?
  - heisenbit 3y ago
    There are businesses and them there are businesses which have a market dominating position. The latter have to be careful to avoid striking preferential deals only available to them furthering their dominant positin.
    - zmgsabst 3y ago
      Coca-Cola and large movie studios sound more like the latter than the former, though.
- Supermancho 3y ago
  > If it's true they colluded to remove ads from Apple pages on Amazon Amazon is not the only company to do this. Not sure how reducing ads is problematic. Amazon doesn't have to show ads it doesn't want to.
lessbergstein 3y ago
Both Apple and Amazon are very important for national security. I wouldn't be surprised if there is more going on here then just preferential treatment.
addicted 3y ago
I returned my unopened Apple Watch to Amazon. Getting my money back has been a massive pain. Usually Amazon literally returns the money when the delivery person picks up the item from my doorstep. But with this Amazon required a scheduled pickup with UPS, did not acknowledge receiving the item even though UPS showed it as received and a few weeks later they are still asking me to wait for 1 month before contacting them for any information. Well, I filed a chargeback with my credit card and automagically the errors in their system got resolved, and the item shows as received (on the correct date 2+ weeks ago), and they are promising a refund in a week (as opposed to 2.5 more weeks). Looks like they’re not just giving Apple preferential treatment but going out of their way to protect Apple.
- Eisenstein 3y ago
  If you are interested in continuing to do business with Amazon I would do some research into how they treat customers that have filed chargebacks against them. I don't personally have experience with this but it is probable that you will end up on their shit list and any further customer service actions may skew outside of you getting any benefit of the doubt or other considerations.
  - addicted 3y ago
    Thanks for the heads up.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    Their customer service has gone to shit. They don’t really give concessions and they now hide the chat link and force you to interact with a bot that spits out misinformation.
- spott 3y ago
  I think it is likely that they are trying to see if the watch you returned was counterfeit before they refunded you. This is probably a difficult process as the counterfeits of Apple products have gotten really good. When you pushed them, they bumped yours to the front of the line.
neonate 3y ago
https://archive.md/YmlLB https://archive.md/YmlLB
jhp123 3y ago
you have to wonder what sort of collusion isn't being uncovered. After all, when you catch someone doing something unethical, it is often the tip of the iceberg. It would be very easy for two tech execs to communicate privately and come to an agreement like "Stop investing in Bing and we'll stop investing in GSuite." We've been through a long period of stagnation from big tech companies, often blamed on cultural problems in a maturing industry. What if the real story is a level of cartelisation far beyond anything revealed so far?
- SllX 3y ago
  Not saying there isn't collusion in the Valley but a negotiated deal with a signed contract complete with paper trail and with both companies, employees and former employees admitting that such a deal exists even if they can't discuss the details when asked about it isn't exactly the definition of collusion. It's an agreement. In fact, if the alternative was that Apple goes to war with Amazon in court over the number of counterfeit Apple products Amazon was selling (or allowing third parties to sell through Amazon) and Apple can build a strong enough case for a court to take it, then a signed agreement before litigation can even begin is a positive outcome from a court's perspective because even if litigation did begin, the court would be spending some time encouraging the parties to negotiate a settlement rather than dragging this out when the court could be hearing other cases. Collusion is illegal and typically done in secret because its illegal, like when Apple, Google, Pixar and some others (I forgot who else, Google it) were suppressing wages–that was collusion. Signing contracts and making deals with other Fortune 500 companies operating in the same sector, even for things that neither company would typically offer to anyone else, is not.
langsoul-com 3y ago
The business insider title is click bait. They asked Amazon to remove counterfeit ads from their when searching for Apple products. Honestly, this should be done for every major brand.
- Exoristos 3y ago
  It's Business Insider -- they're journalistic cancer.
dehrmann 3y ago
I get annoyed any time I search for a brand term and get competitors' ads. If I wanted to see a variety of smartphones, I wouldn't have searched for "iphone." My only issue is you have to be Apple-big to do this.
yazaddaruvala 3y ago
Disclaimer: I used to work for Amazon for many years. Context: It’s been a few years but I built many of these counterfeit detecting systems from greenfield. Including the early architecture integrations with the ads teams. AMA (I can’t always say everything, but I’ll answer to my best ability in the morning)
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  What proportion of counterfeits could you detect? Was there any concern on liability as presumably Amazon can detect lots of counterfeits but choose not to? Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site?
  - yazaddaruvala 3y ago
    > What proportion of counterfeits could you detect? This is an impossible question to answer. The numerator was a known number of counterfeits but the denominator is entirely unknown. > Was there any concern on liability Yes many brands, including Apple, would threaten to sue. Some even did but as a developer I wasn’t involved in those details to know much. > Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site? Absolutely! There were entire organizations of 100s of people devoted to just this task. Including appeal pathways for sellers to get back access to the site.

206 points by acecreamu 3y ago

38 3y ago

> As detailed by today’s report, the agreement between Apple and Amazon includes a carveout that reduces the number of ads and recommendations that appear on product pages for Apple devices. While Amazon product pages are generally full of ads, sponsored results, and recommendations, Apple’s product pages show only one banner ad at the very bottom of the page. > In contrast, product pages for Apple competitors like Samsung are riddled with ads from competitors, recommendations, and other sponsored banners. Insider says that other companies, including Samsung, have complained about the preferential treatment given to Apple.

CSMastermind 3y ago

It sounds like Apple was upset about the counterfeit products being sold on Amazon and, after issuing hundreds of thousands of takedown notices threatened to sue Amazon themselves and reached an agreement where Amazon took measures to eliminate the counterfeits. The knock seems to be that they only did this for Apple products, not counterfeits of say Samsung phones because they were not pressured in similar ways by Samsung.

jtbayly 3y ago
I didn't read the whole article, but it seemed focused on (missing) advertisements, not on counterfeits.
- nemo 3y ago
  The advertisements were what was driving the counterfeiting. It was by giving Apple a page without third parties injecting ads into it that they handled the counterfeiting issue.
- BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
  > I didn't read the whole article That's rectifiable.
  - robwwilliams 3y ago
    Great response!
    - QuantumGood 3y ago
      itsrectifiable.com is available.
      - twothamendment 3y ago
        Was available... For the right price, it is rectifiable.
      - CoastalCoder 3y ago
        I really, really hope it's bought by an analog electronics manufacturer.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- neogodless 3y ago
  It's both. > In a statement today, Apple explained: > > Apple also told Insider that the 2018 agreement with Amazon “sought to address significant counterfeit and safety issues” on Amazon’s marketplace.
QwertyPi 3y ago
Ok, there are two issues here: 1. Amazon refuses to hold themselves accountable for the products they sell—they advertise one thing but sell you another, clearly indicating they have no idea what they're actually selling. 2. Apple relies on legal protections to artificially inflate the pricing of their products. AirPods aren't much better than bluetooth headphones sold for a tenth the price, and they are straight-up inferior to the products of competitors with a third their price. If the superiority of their own products were so obvious the branding wouldn't be an issue at all. And don't even get me started on how they force consumers to buy their hardware to get access to their software, which should be forced to be sold on the open market along side their competitors. Now of course we need to fix the first issue to fix the second one, but the second issue has far more destructive consequences.
- DueDilligence 3y ago
  [dead]
- 93po 3y ago
  I don't know of any third party options to Airpods that: 1. pair instantly without problems to my apple devices 2. intelligently know when to switch between my phone to my laptop 3. intelligently know when to switch from car bluetooth to headphones 4. is compatible with "Find My" 5. has magsafe charging 6. has same sound quality and sound cancellation with above features these are all very important to me and my experience with literally any other non-apple device has been awful
  - seec 3y ago
    Those "features" are arbitrary stuff Apple told you to care about through their marketing. Many people really don't care about them, because outside the Apple ecosystem, there are other, often better solutions. The auto switching never worked properly for me so I'm always curious how come all Apple fanboys have it working so well. In my opinion it's like the Siri "demo" I got back in the day where the thing supposedly working so well, completely, and utterly failed, yet my Apple fan friend acted like everything worked fine. I have non-Apple Bluetooth earbuds and they pair simply fine to my Apple devices (and others). Apple oversell the shit of their iCloud "auto switching" (that often do not work) but what you actually want is Bluetooth multipoint, a feature that many headphones in the price range of Airpods have. Find my and MagSafe charging are very odd, Apple marketing induced request, and Apple definitely doesn't have a lead in sound quality at the price they sell their stuff. If anything, their sound quality is extremely disappointing considering the price. Funny thing is that for the price of a set of Airpods, you can get 2-3 equivalent competitors' products. So much of the stuff you say matters is largely irrelevant. Before calling me a hater: I'm an Apple customer since the PPC days and bought both first iPod and first iPhone. But I am currently leaving the Apple ecosystem precisely because their pricing is not grounded in any technological reality, and mostly about fashion/social statuts.

DueDilligence 3y ago

[dead]

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

What exactly is the consumer harm here supposed to be?

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Were I Samsung, I would be pissed that competitor’s (cheaper) products get shown on my page. As a consumer, it shows that Amazon is aware of counterfeits, and has the ability to limit them, but does nothing unless the seller can raise an appropriate fit. Have I previously purchased counterfeit Samsung X? Sounds like Amazon might have a good intuition, but does nothing to stop it.
- gwern 3y ago
  Were you Samsung, one would hope you would be more pissed about your crummy software and ecosystem where $900 smartphones are jammed full of ads and fourth-rate buggy plagiarisms of better Google/Apple services, and understand why better companies than you can negotiate better treatment than you.
viknesh 3y ago
I think you could argue something like "Amazon is aware that it's ads broadly promote counterfeits but leave them up"

tracerbulletx 3y ago

Retailer and vendor make a contractual deal to merchandise product. Is your grocery store colluding with CocaCola to display their products right at the front of the store while putting healthy items like milk far away!!?? Are they harming the health of your children?? Is this just a conspiracy to make greedy dentists richer?? More news at 11

iris2004 3y ago
Amazon is both a retailer and marketplace. If it prevents fake Coke being sold because of a secret deal, but is happy to sell fake Pepsi, then that is absolutely a problem for both consumers and sellers which should be scrutinised, especially considering its position in the market.
hedora 3y ago
> Is your grocery store colluding with CocaCola to display their products right at the front of the store while putting healthy items like milk far away!!?? Of course they are. I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic, but Coca Cola exists precisely because of those sorts of distribution and product placement deals. Grocery stores are paid a ton of money to place products in favorable spots on the shelves and end caps. That and the consumer surveillance loyalty cards are a huge fraction of their profits. (I’d ban both practices if I were supreme dictator. Sadly, I am not.)

qgin 3y ago

How is this any different than Apple having its own wood-and-steel display area in Best Buy?

lucb1e 3y ago
I guess in a real store, you can see that it's there, and so any competitor knows this is something the store does and a deal they can get as well?
microtherion 3y ago
Yes, the very reason for Apple to create the "store-in-store" concept was that they thought that the buying experience for their products was inadequate (both in presentation of the products and qualification of the staff): https://web.archive.org/web/19990210163227/http://product.info.apple.com/pr/press.releases/1998/q1/971104.pr.rel.compusa.html https://web.archive.org/web/19990210163227/http://product.in... The Amazon storefront simply seems to be an extension of that concept from brick and mortar to online stores. I'm not sure what's supposed to be unlawful or unethical about this. [Disclaimer: I work for Apple, but not in a retail oriented role, nor as a spokesperson]
- kube-system 3y ago
  I think the difference is that Best Buy retail stores are not a marketplace, there are no third-party sellers in a Best Buy.
  - sib 3y ago
    In fact, there are, as in much of Big Box retail.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      There's store-within-a-store, but it's not really the same thing as a marketplace, and not the type of thing where any provider dominates the market enough to have a monopolistic power on it.

echelon 3y ago

> In contrast, product pages for Apple competitors like Samsung are riddled with ads from competitors, recommendations, and other sponsored banners. Insider says that other companies, including Samsung, have complained about the preferential treatment given to Apple. You shouldn't be allowed to place ads against another company's product listings or trademarked brands. You shouldn't be able to pay Google to advertise and gain search placement ahead of another company's trademarked brands, either.

neogodless 3y ago
That is the grand philosophical question. Should companies be able to do this? Is Amazon a marketplace, or the marketplace? Rewind 15 years ago, and I compared local retail, Amazon, NewEgg, Buy.com, etc. I researched each product, and then researched which site would give me a good price plus shipping. Of course Amazon won this battle and edged out many competitors. But most people tend to go to Amazon, and let Amazon make decisions for them. That's kind of our own fault, but it's also worrying. Now I won't argue that Apple is or isn't the best maker of whatever product someone went to Amazon to shop for. But I still would like the products to be presented equally and fairly. But... I suppose I want companies to be able to give each other money to get different levels of service, too. How do you draw this line?
smoldesu 3y ago
So if I search Amazon for "Tylenol", you're saying the experience is better if they don't show me bulk acetaminophen? Or, is the damage to Tylenol just too great to offer people an alternative? I'm not really sure what your point is here. What's wrong with comparing products across brands?
toast0 3y ago
Why not? As long as it's not deceptive, seems ok to me. Trademarks don't mean absolute ownership of a word. I'm not a huge fan of advertising in retail, but even in offline retail, manufacturers/distributors are paying for shelf space, either directly in dollars or offset from the product cost / managed through other terms. Having your product accessory or competitor shelved nearby a more well known product is helpful; ads in a retail website are analogous to that.

pimlottc 3y ago

While I get the principle at play here, it’s pretty hard to get mad at Apple for getting Amazon to show fewer ads.

wnevets 3y ago

Amazon knows all about of the garbage being sold on its site but only does something about it if you're a massive tech company who threatens to sue, very cool. I wonder how many of these thumb drives are legit. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L13&sprefix=2+tb+thumb+driv%2Caps%2C71 https://www.amazon.com/s?k=2+tb+thumb+drive&crid=YZ410MSN6L1...

neilv 3y ago
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMBX671V/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CMBX671V/ I wonder whether they used Samsung's factory tooling for that.
malfist 3y ago
Amazon makes money from those garbage companies having an ad war over who gets to deceive the eyeballs of Amazon's customers first, and then takes a cut when it gets sold. Customer Obsession and Earns Trust might be two of Amazon's Leadership Principles, but no principles stand in the way of cold hard cash.
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  My dad used to say principles are like farts. You can only hold them for so long.
- StressedDev 3y ago
  I agree with you about Amazon's leadership principals. It's clear that the retail side of Amazon regularly ignores them. My favorite example of this was I was browsing the "top 50" computer science books on Amazon. This was about 10 years ago. In the top 50, they had basic how to books (like how to use Linux or Excel), books on getting coding jobs, etc. They had almost no actual computer science books and yet, the top 50 list software almost certainly created by people with a computer science degrees!! The list even listed the same title more than once in a few cases. It was obvious that the software which built the list was broken and either had not been tested or was deployed in a known broken state. Customer obsession does not mean shipping obviously broken software which does not help the customer. As for trust, when I canceled Prime, Amazon used dark patterns to make the process as painful as possible. Not much to say other than I do not trust companies which try to trick me into not canceling a subscription I do not want.

jrockway 3y ago

I had no idea Apple got preferential treatment. I have never seen what I thought to be a genuine Apple product on Amazon. I assumed Apple was taking steps to prevent anyone from selling anything Apple-branded there. The fact that they're doing the opposite is just crazy to me. I looked more closely and they don't seem to sell iPhones, which is I guess where I get the impression from. Their other items have weird prices that are different from the Apple Store, which also screamed "scam" to me. But I guess not?

neogodless 3y ago
amazon.com/apple forwards me to https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/77D9E1F7-0337-4282-9DB6-B6B8FB2DC98D https://www.amazon.com/stores/page/77D9E1F7-0337-4282-9DB6-B... The Apple storefront. Lots of macbooks and watches to buy. Oddly enough, the iPhone only shows up in searches as used/renewed items, not brand new. Is that an Amazon thing or an Apple thing?
- jrockway 3y ago
  Yeah, I clicked that link in the article and was surprised. I had never seen it before, but I guess I just assumed given how often-counterfeited anything Apple is, that it's something I'd never look for on Ali... em... Amazon. Meanwhile, ordering something from the Apple Store is super simple (since I have many nearby), and you know that the Apple Store isn't going to be selling counterfeit Apple products.
- deelowe 3y ago
  Might be a carrier thing.

alberth 3y ago

Dumb question: why is this not allowed? Presumably, Apple paid Amazon to reduce the number of ads. What's so wrong about that? All companies allow large enterprise customers (who drive high revenue), to have custom / tailored offerings based on their requests.

neogodless 3y ago
It's allowed. The word in the article was scrutiny. The law suit is not about the ads, per se. It's about price-fixing, which you can probably agree should not be allowed.
kube-system 3y ago
When a company controls a large part of a market, regulators give extra scrutiny to any efforts that company may make that harms competition.
- scarface_74 3y ago
  You mean 36% of e-commerce and an even smaller portion of all retail?
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Yes, 36% (I believe it's actually 37.6%) of e-commerce is a large portion. It is 587% larger than the second place competitor.
    - scarface_74 3y ago
      Yes because Amazon used unfair practices to crush small competitors like Walmart…
      - kube-system 3y ago
        No, I don't think I've seen that being claimed. It has been claimed that they have used their anticompetitive practices against others. Having Walmart as a competitor doesn't mean that they don't have a dominant market position with power to abuse at their disposal.

karaterobot 3y ago

If it's true they colluded to remove ads from Apple pages on Amazon, both companies deserve what they get. Why do it sneakily? Why not have a page somewhere on Amazon that says "hey, if you want us to remove ads from your product listings, pay us [10x the total lifetime amount we expect to get in ad revenue from running ads on the page] per product page". Most companies wouldn't do it, so it wouldn't change Amazon's model much at all. Meanwhile, Apple could afford it trivially. While sleazy, it would be a completely legal offering that would never come back to bite them in the butt.

ribosometronome 3y ago
It sounds like you are saying that businesses should only be able to sell services that they publicly advertise with prices. For example, if Coca Cola wanted to have a product placement idk the eventual Jok3r movie, would Warner Brothers would need to advertise that service somewhere on the website? Would you see Coca Cola's advertising department calling WB and being "yo, what do we have to do to get poison ivy to have a fridge full of Coca Cola?" be sneaky?
- heisenbit 3y ago
  There are businesses and them there are businesses which have a market dominating position. The latter have to be careful to avoid striking preferential deals only available to them furthering their dominant positin.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    Coca-Cola and large movie studios sound more like the latter than the former, though.
Supermancho 3y ago
> If it's true they colluded to remove ads from Apple pages on Amazon Amazon is not the only company to do this. Not sure how reducing ads is problematic. Amazon doesn't have to show ads it doesn't want to.

lessbergstein 3y ago

Both Apple and Amazon are very important for national security. I wouldn't be surprised if there is more going on here then just preferential treatment.

addicted 3y ago

I returned my unopened Apple Watch to Amazon. Getting my money back has been a massive pain. Usually Amazon literally returns the money when the delivery person picks up the item from my doorstep. But with this Amazon required a scheduled pickup with UPS, did not acknowledge receiving the item even though UPS showed it as received and a few weeks later they are still asking me to wait for 1 month before contacting them for any information. Well, I filed a chargeback with my credit card and automagically the errors in their system got resolved, and the item shows as received (on the correct date 2+ weeks ago), and they are promising a refund in a week (as opposed to 2.5 more weeks). Looks like they’re not just giving Apple preferential treatment but going out of their way to protect Apple.

Eisenstein 3y ago
If you are interested in continuing to do business with Amazon I would do some research into how they treat customers that have filed chargebacks against them. I don't personally have experience with this but it is probable that you will end up on their shit list and any further customer service actions may skew outside of you getting any benefit of the doubt or other considerations.
- addicted 3y ago
  Thanks for the heads up.
- userinanother 3y ago
  Their customer service has gone to shit. They don’t really give concessions and they now hide the chat link and force you to interact with a bot that spits out misinformation.
spott 3y ago
I think it is likely that they are trying to see if the watch you returned was counterfeit before they refunded you. This is probably a difficult process as the counterfeits of Apple products have gotten really good. When you pushed them, they bumped yours to the front of the line.

neonate 3y ago

https://archive.md/YmlLB https://archive.md/YmlLB

jhp123 3y ago

you have to wonder what sort of collusion isn't being uncovered. After all, when you catch someone doing something unethical, it is often the tip of the iceberg. It would be very easy for two tech execs to communicate privately and come to an agreement like "Stop investing in Bing and we'll stop investing in GSuite." We've been through a long period of stagnation from big tech companies, often blamed on cultural problems in a maturing industry. What if the real story is a level of cartelisation far beyond anything revealed so far?

SllX 3y ago
Not saying there isn't collusion in the Valley but a negotiated deal with a signed contract complete with paper trail and with both companies, employees and former employees admitting that such a deal exists even if they can't discuss the details when asked about it isn't exactly the definition of collusion. It's an agreement. In fact, if the alternative was that Apple goes to war with Amazon in court over the number of counterfeit Apple products Amazon was selling (or allowing third parties to sell through Amazon) and Apple can build a strong enough case for a court to take it, then a signed agreement before litigation can even begin is a positive outcome from a court's perspective because even if litigation did begin, the court would be spending some time encouraging the parties to negotiate a settlement rather than dragging this out when the court could be hearing other cases. Collusion is illegal and typically done in secret because its illegal, like when Apple, Google, Pixar and some others (I forgot who else, Google it) were suppressing wages–that was collusion. Signing contracts and making deals with other Fortune 500 companies operating in the same sector, even for things that neither company would typically offer to anyone else, is not.

langsoul-com 3y ago

The business insider title is click bait. They asked Amazon to remove counterfeit ads from their when searching for Apple products. Honestly, this should be done for every major brand.

Exoristos 3y ago
It's Business Insider -- they're journalistic cancer.

dehrmann 3y ago

I get annoyed any time I search for a brand term and get competitors' ads. If I wanted to see a variety of smartphones, I wouldn't have searched for "iphone." My only issue is you have to be Apple-big to do this.

yazaddaruvala 3y ago

Disclaimer: I used to work for Amazon for many years. Context: It’s been a few years but I built many of these counterfeit detecting systems from greenfield. Including the early architecture integrations with the ads teams. AMA (I can’t always say everything, but I’ll answer to my best ability in the morning)

pbhjpbhj 3y ago
What proportion of counterfeits could you detect? Was there any concern on liability as presumably Amazon can detect lots of counterfeits but choose not to? Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site?
- yazaddaruvala 3y ago
  > What proportion of counterfeits could you detect? This is an impossible question to answer. The numerator was a known number of counterfeits but the denominator is entirely unknown. > Was there any concern on liability Yes many brands, including Apple, would threaten to sue. Some even did but as a developer I wasn’t involved in those details to know much. > Was there any effort to prevent sellers they know are selling junk, or going to sell junk, from using the site? Absolutely! There were entire organizations of 100s of people devoted to just this task. Including appeal pathways for sellers to get back access to the site.