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by burkaman 1101 days ago
FTC complaint: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/amazon-rosca-pu...

Significant redactions around Amazon executives being aware of a "nonconsensual enrollment problem" and blocking any changes.

> the primary purpose of the Prime cancellation process was not to enable subscribers to cancel, but rather to thwart them. Fittingly, Amazon named that process “Iliad,” which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Amazon designed the Iliad cancellation process (“Iliad Flow”) to be labyrinthine, and Amazon and its leadership—including Lindsay, Grandinetti, and Ghani—slowed or rejected user experience changes that would have made Iliad simpler for consumers because those changes adversely affected Amazon’s bottom line.

A lot of the evidence in the complaint is completely redacted. FTC says "For now, the FTC’s complaint is significantly redacted, though the FTC has told the Court it does not find the need for ongoing secrecy compelling."
2 comments
everybodyknows 1101 days ago
> Amazon named that process “Iliad,” which refers to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War.

Wonder who allegorized as the customer for them, say Priam, Hector or Cassandra?

The first two are of course slaughtered, while the last is merely enslaved, IIRC. So I'd bet on Cassandra.

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dcminter 1101 days ago
Some of the redactions are single words trivially inferred from context; what's with that?
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burkaman 1101 days ago
I didn't see any that were that obvious, but it sounds like the redactions are at Amazon's request, so they probably went for anything that could conceivably be construed as private information.
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dcminter 1101 days ago
E.g. lines 7 and 9 it's "checkout" or "upsell". Probably the latter. Can't be the same as the longer redacted term on line 7 - though I suppose it might be an abbreviation for it and they're protecting their internal product/codename for some lawyerly reason?
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csydas 1101 days ago
it could just be as simple as a group of persons as amazon didn't want certain words associated with them on a public government document. Lot easier to deflect accusations of overly aggressive upselling when you can just say "the report released by the government never once mentioned upselling" and just pretend that you don't need to answer the question based on that.
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