BREAKING: We just sued Amazon over what we believe was a vast, ad-rigging scheme. We believe Amazon found a way to charge a few extra pennies to an enormous number of transactions, adding up to over $20 billion in illegal charges. This is about how something becomes a "Sponsored product." Amazon lets businesses bid to be "Sponsored" but it told businesses that the highest bid would only pay slightly more than the second-highest bid. For example: If you bid $1 to have your product “Sponsored” and the next-highest bid is $0.50, you should pay about $0.51. But we believe that Amazon would run the auction, see those bids, and then secretly raise the second-place price so it could charge the winner more. It was a gradual strategy based on concealment. Internal Amazon documents show they tested how much they could raise those hidden charges without advertisers catching on, then raised them more when businesses didn’t react, then gave false answers when businesses started asking questions. This is a case about affordability, fair competition, and basic honesty in the marketplace. My thanks to the big bipartisan team on this, from AGs across the country to the FTC.