Amazon reaches $2.5 billion settlement over Prime enrolment and cancellation
The FTC’s case concerned design practices that enrolled customers in Prime without clear consent and made cancellation unnecessarily difficult.
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Consent and choice are meaningful only when interfaces, cancellation paths and representations are clear enough for people to act on them.
Documented records
24EU makes Microsoft Teams unbundling and interoperability commitments binding
The Commission had concerns that tying Teams to Microsoft 365 and Office 365 gave Teams a distribution advantage and that limited interoperability made it harder for competing communication tools to compete. Microsoft offered suite versions without Teams, pricing differences, switching rights, interoperability and data-portability measures.
View caseAmazon gives UK undertakings on fake reviews and catalogue abuse
The CMA investigated concerns that Amazon was not doing enough to detect and remove fake reviews, identify suspicious behaviour or sanction reviewers and sellers involved. The undertakings also address catalogue abuse, where reviews for one product can be attached to another product listing.
View caseEU fines Meta €200 million over its consent-or-pay model
The Commission found that Meta’s binary model required Facebook and Instagram users either to consent to combining personal data for personalised advertising or pay for an ad-free service. It did not offer the less-personalised but otherwise equivalent service required by the Digital Markets Act.
View caseEuropean Commission fines Meta €797.72 million over Facebook Marketplace practices
The Commission found that Meta tied Facebook Marketplace to Facebook, giving the classified-ads service a distribution advantage that competitors could not match. It also found that Meta imposed unfair conditions allowing it to use advertising data generated by rival classified-ad providers for Marketplace’s benefit.
View caseLinkedIn fined €310 million over behavioural analysis and advertising
The regulator examined LinkedIn’s legal bases for processing members’ data for behavioural analysis and targeted advertising. It found failures involving lawfulness, fairness and transparency.
View caseCMA accepts Meta commitments limiting use of advertising customers’ data
The CMA investigated whether Meta could use data from businesses advertising on its platforms to gain an unfair advantage when developing and improving products that competed with those businesses, including Facebook Marketplace.
View caseEuropean regulators order a ban on Meta’s unlawful behavioural advertising processing
The EDPB found an ongoing infringement involving processing for behavioural advertising on the basis of contract and legitimate interests across the European Economic Area.
View caseAmazon ordered to pay $25 million over children’s Alexa recordings
The government alleged that Amazon retained children’s voice recordings indefinitely, disregarded deletion requests and used retained data to improve Alexa’s algorithms.
View caseRing settles FTC charges over employee access and account security
The FTC alleged that Ring gave employees and contractors broad access to customers’ videos and failed to implement basic security measures, enabling account takeovers and harassment.
View caseEU makes Amazon marketplace, Buy Box and Prime commitments binding
The Commission had preliminary concerns that Amazon used non-public seller data for its own retail decisions and may have favoured its retail or logistics operations in access to the Buy Box and Prime. Amazon offered changes covering seller-data use, offer ranking, a second Buy Box offer and non-discriminatory Prime access.
View caseCNIL fines Microsoft €60 million over Bing cookies
CNIL found that Bing placed an advertising cookie on users’ devices without valid consent when they visited the search engine. It also found that the site offered a one-click route to accept cookies but no equally direct route to refuse them.
View caseCourt approves settlement over discrimination in Meta’s housing-ad delivery
The Justice Department alleged that Meta’s housing-ad system discriminated in who received advertisements based on race, colour, religion, sex, disability, family status and national origin. The case addressed both advertiser targeting options and the effects of Meta’s delivery algorithms.
View caseWashington consent decree ends Amazon’s Sold by Amazon pricing programme
Washington alleged that the Sold by Amazon programme replaced price competition between Amazon and participating third-party sellers with prices set by Amazon. The state said the programme could raise prices and steer customers towards Amazon’s own products.
View caseCNIL fines Facebook Ireland €60 million over cookie refusal design
CNIL found that visitors to facebook.com in France could accept cookies immediately but could not refuse them with comparable ease. Refusal required several additional actions, which the authority found affected users’ freedom of consent.
View caseIrish DPC fines WhatsApp €225 million over transparency
The DPC investigated how WhatsApp Ireland explained its processing to users and non-users, including the information it provided about data shared between WhatsApp and other Facebook companies. The European Data Protection Board resolved objections among supervisory authorities and instructed the DPC to reassess the proposed fine.
View caseAmazon pays $61.7 million after withholding Flex driver tips
The FTC alleged that Amazon reduced its own contribution to driver pay after promising drivers they would receive all customer tips, and failed to make the change clear.
View caseCNIL fines Amazon €35 million over advertising cookies
CNIL found that Amazon Europe Core placed advertising cookies on visitors’ devices before consent and provided inadequate information about their purpose. The authority also found that the mechanism offered to people arriving through an advertisement did not provide valid prior consent.
View caseFacebook agrees to $5 billion FTC privacy settlement
The FTC alleged that Facebook violated a 2012 privacy order by misleading users about control over their personal information and the handling of facial-recognition settings and phone numbers.
View caseEU makes Amazon e-book parity-clause commitments binding
The Commission’s preliminary view was that clauses in Amazon’s publisher agreements could reduce incentives for competing e-book platforms to differentiate through price, release terms, promotions or business models. Amazon offered not to enforce or introduce the clauses and to let publishers terminate affected contracts.
View caseFederal court finds Amazon liable for children’s unauthorised in-app charges
A federal court found that Amazon billed account holders for in-app purchases made by children without obtaining informed consent. The purchase flows appeared in games and other apps used by children and, during parts of the relevant period, allowed charges without a password.
View caseEU fines Microsoft €561 million for missing browser choice screen
Microsoft had committed to show Windows users in the EEA a screen offering a choice of web browsers. The Commission found that the screen was not displayed to approximately 15.3 million Windows 7 Service Pack 1 users between May 2011 and July 2012.
View caseEuropean Commission fines Microsoft €497.2 million for abuse of dominance
The Commission found that Microsoft abused its dominant position by refusing to supply and authorise the use of interoperability information needed by competing work-group server operating systems, and by tying Windows Media Player to Windows.
View caseUS final judgment imposes remedies after Microsoft antitrust liability
After trial and appeal, liability remained for Microsoft’s unlawful maintenance of its operating-system monopoly through exclusionary conduct affecting middleware and browser competition. The 2002 final judgment resolved the federal and settling-state remedy proceedings.
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