In its recent lawsuit against Amazon, the Federal Trade Commission accused the company and former CEO Jeff Bezos of flooding the e-commerce site with irrelevant “junk ads” to boost profit.
The unusual arrangement follows the iPhone-maker’s private demands to Amazon to only show its products in results when an Apple term like “iPad” is searched, according to an internal email previously shared by the House Judiciary Committee.
“We understand that Apple does not want to drive sales to competing brands in search or detail pages,” Amazon’s retail CEO at the time, Jeff Wilke, wrote in the email.
Back in 2018, Amazon appears to have initially refused Apple’s request, but left open the possibility of working out a financial arrangement, according to the email shared by the House Judiciary Committee.
Large advertisers on Amazon constantly ask for this type of exclusivity, but the company usually denies those requests because it wants a diverse set of search results and ads, one of the people said.
The special treatment given to Apple is very different from Amazon’s broader mandate to accept more ads on its marketplace, even if that hurts the customer experience, a practice alleged in detail in the FTC’s filing last week.
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