Daily Archives: November 5, 2023

Unredacted documents in the FTC’s Amazon lawsuit shed light on the company’s secret price-gouging algorithm

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It looks like Amazon is hellbent on keeping its spot as the biggest online retailer — even if that means hurting both sellers and customers. In September, the FTC filed a long-expected antitrust lawsuit against Amazon over its alleged use of illegal strategies to stay on top. Details of the suit were previously withheld from the public, but today a mostly unredacted version was released, including details about Amazon’s secret pricing tool, known as Project Nessie. These algorithms helped Amazon increase prices by over $1 billion over two years, the FTC alleges.

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According to the The Wall Street Journal, the internal documents cited in the original complaint show that Amazon executives were well aware of the effects of the company’s policies. In the documents, Amazon executives acknowledged that these policies, which included requiring Amazon sellers to have the lowest prices online or risk consequences, had a “punitive aspect.” One executive pointed out that many sellers “live in constant fear” of being penalized by Amazon for not following the ever-changing pricing policy.

The FTC also alleges that the company had been monitoring its sellers and punishing them if they offered lower prices on other platforms, which the agency says is a violation of antitrust laws. The unredacted documents indicate that Amazon has increased prices by over $1 billion between 2016 to 2018 with the use of secret price gouging algorithms known as Project Nessie. It was also revealed that the “take rate” — aka the amount Amazon makes from sellers who use the Fulfillment By Amazon logistics program — increased from 27.6 percent in 2014 to 39.5 percent in 2018. It’s unclear if that has changed in more recent years since those numbers remained redacted.

And Amazon isn’t just ruining its sellers’ experience. The complaint also revealed Amazon’s increased use of ads in search results. Several ad executives at the company acknowledged that these sponsored ads were often irrelevant to the initial search and caused “harm to consumers” and the overall experience on the site.

The FTC alleges that these policies were the brainchild of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and former chief executive, to increase the company’s profit margins.

“Mr. Bezos directly ordered his advertising team to continue to increase the number of advertisements on Amazon by allowing more irrelevant advertisements, because the revenue generated by advertisements eclipsed the revenue lost by degrading consumers’ shopping experience,” the FTC complaint alleges.

Source: Unredacted documents in the FTC’s Amazon lawsuit shed light on the company’s secret price-gouging algorithm

Library of Babel Online – all books ever written or ever to be written, all images ever created or ever to be created can be found here

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The Library of Babel is a place for scholars to do research, for artists and writers to seek inspiration, for anyone with curiosity or a sense of humor to reflect on the weirdness of existence – in short, it’s just like any other library. If completed, it would contain every possible combination of 1,312,000 characters, including lower case letters, space, comma, and period. Thus, it would contain every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on. At present it contains all possible pages of 3200 characters, about 104677 books.

Since I imagine the question will present itself in some visitors’ minds (a certain amount of distrust of the virtual is inevitable) I’ll head off any doubts: any text you find in any location of the library will be in the same place in perpetuity. We do not simply generate and store books as they are requested – in fact, the storage demands would make that impossible. Every possible permutation of letters is accessible at this very moment in one of the library’s books, only awaiting its discovery. We encourage those who find strange concatenations among the variations of letters to write about their discoveries in the forum, so future generations may benefit from their research.

Source: About the Library

Audi Will Make You Pay A Subscription For More Features You Already Bought Starting Next Year

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Over the summer, BMW finally backed down on its heated seat subscription program from sheer public outrage and bad press. This response apparently hasn’t deterred its rival Audi, however, as the German car company plans to make more new software features paid options on its next generation of vehicles.

Pioneered on the E-Tron and E-Tron Sportback, Audi offers over-the-air features through its myAudi app, adding functions like automated parking or lock-unlock light animations. To borrow a term from the gaming world, they’re microtransactions writ large to milk more money from customers. It’s like horse armor but for your car. Audi’s board rep for technical development Oliver Hoffmann has told Autocar that more “on demand” features like these are on their way.

2024 Audi Q8 E-Tron

2024 Audi Q8 E-Tron. Audi

“With our next generation of electronic architecture, we will bring more offers to ‘function on demand’ and you will see year by year we will bring new functions in the cars,” Hoffman told the outlet, claiming it’s a response to customer demand. “This is a [big] step. I think there is a demand from the customer to bring new functions in the car, and this is a profit pool for us—but we don’t see these revenue pools with this kind of functionality.”

Hoffmann reportedly wouldn’t say which features are coming, but was adamant that paid, downloadable features will be “quite normal in the future.” Which features exactly may be previewed by Audi itself, which already paywalls some climate control functions in some markets.

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However, owners themselves are pushing back, and in some cases have unlocked features for free by jailbreaking their cars.

Carmakers are clear that they won’t back down on paywalling new features, even though the vast majority of customers don’t want to pay for subscription services in their cars. But it’s hard to get blood from a stone, and when prices seem to leap with every passing month, something’s gonna give—and it might not be customers’ wallets.

Source: Audi Will Paywall More Software Features Starting Next Year