Judge finds Amazon acted in bad faith during discovery in FTC litigation

> Given the totality of circumstances, the Court finds that Amazon’s behavior warrants no more relief except an admonition by this Court. Amazon and its counsel are admonished that their conduct during discovery was tantamount to bad faith. Similar conduct may lead to more serious sanctions.

That'll fix it.

The FTC received an extension of time for discovery, 90 days, and Amazon was ordered to pay attorneys fees and costs for the additional discovery

https://archive.org/download/gov.uscourts.wawd.323520/gov.us...

Thus, the problem was "fixed"

The court reserved its decision on bad faith and instructed that if the FTC wished to pursue a finding of bad faith, the parties should schedule oral argument

After oral argument, the court found that Amazon's conduct was tantamount to bad faith

What! No. The company accused of operating in bad faith towards its customers operated in bad faith towards investigators who were uncovering evidence of that bad faith?

That would indicate that the bad faith wasn’t an accidental act by a few rogue employees, but rather a conscious company policy directed from the highest levels.

Too bad no penalties of consequence will stick because the whole American system of justice is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.

I'm sure Amazon totally learned their lesson by experiencing no consequences.

Some later discussion on the FTC release: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45374064

Somewhat related, but I still buy MP3s from Amazon, and twice doing this has signed my up for an Amazon Music subscription. I have no idea how this happened. I don't think there's the same thing with Prime where there's a deceptive-but-perceptible screen. From what I can tell I purchased and then was just automatically signed up for a subscription. I yelled at customer service about it twice and it hasn't happened since.

I hate that this website doesn’t let you select text from within the document. But one part that stood out is emails that were withheld in discovery that claimed attorney-client privilege but had nothing in the email chain indicating content that would be subject to this. It seems like Amazon is abusing that to hide information from the justice system. I’ve heard that some other companies (Microsoft, Google) encourage employees to do this, but what’s in here is pretty brazen.