Amazon is on trial for allegedly pushing customers into Prime

The federal government is taking Amazon to task over the difficulty of canceling a Prime subscription.

It’s a particularly modern problem: You sign up for a service, perhaps intending to run out the clock on a free trial, then forget to cancel the subscription — or can’t even figure out how to cancel in the first place. This issue is so common that there are services that help you cancel unwanted subscriptions — and yes, these services themselves often require a subscription.

This particular case was brought by the Federal Trade Commission, which alleges that the tech giant’s Prime subscription may rope in some unsuspecting customers and also proves especially difficult to cancel. The FTC claims that as many as 40 million users have been affected by these practices.

The jury trial begins this week, and as The Wall Street Journal reported, the FTC first sued Amazon in 2023, under the Biden administration:

“The FTC, which sued Amazon in 2023, alleges the company tricked people into signing up for the service without their knowledge or consent, including by obscuring details about billing and the terms of free trials. It says Amazon created a labyrinth to make it hard to cancel, which the company dubbed ‘Iliad,’ a reference to Homer’s epic about the long, arduous Trojan War. Several individual Amazon executives are also named as defendants.”

Jury selection was set to begin Monday, with opening arguments following not long after. The trial should last about a month, The Verge noted.

The FTC alleges that, at one point, Amazon required users to navigate four webpages and 15 options to cancel a Prime subscription. An Amazon spokesperson denied any wrongdoing, telling the Journal that “the bottom line is that neither Amazon nor the individual defendants did anything wrong.”

The FTC brought a similar case against Uber earlier this year. In that suit, the FTC claimed that Uber signed up some customers for an Uber One membership without their knowledge, while also making it unnecessarily difficult to cancel the monthly subscription.

So, take this as a reminder to be wary of free trials — that auto-renew really can sneak up on you.