Amazon / Amazon.com / Jeff Bezos

[AndyinPA]

https://apnews.com/article/amazon-hq-he ... 75db7d5c18

NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon is pausing construction of its second headquarters in Virginia following the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history and its shifting plans around remote work.

The Seattle-based company is delaying the beginning of construction of PenPlace, the second phase of its headquarters development in northern Virginia, Amazon’s real estate chief John Schoettler said in a statement. He said the company has already hired more than 8,000 employees and will welcome them to the Met Park campus, the first phase of development, when it opens this June.

[pipistrelle]

Is Amazon going out of business? Now they're dropping magazine subscriptions on Kindle. How'm I going to get Guns & Ammo?

[neonzx]

Is Amazon going out of business? Now they're dropping magazine subscriptions on Kindle. How'm I going to get Guns & Ammo?

Likely not going out of business. But, have to scale-back after their pandemic rise. They have competition. Magazines, even digital versions -- who buys those anymore? Plus Besos has that obnoxious boat to compete. That didn't construct itself for free, ya know.

[pipistrelle]

Is Amazon going out of business? Now they're dropping magazine subscriptions on Kindle. How'm I going to get Guns & Ammo?

Likely not going out of business. But, have to scale-back after their pandemic rise. They have competition. Magazines, even digital versions -- who buys those anymore? Plus Besos has that obnoxious boat to compete. That didn't construct itself for free, ya know.

I have three subscriptions.

[realist]

Is Amazon going out of business? Now they're dropping magazine subscriptions on Kindle. How'm I going to get Guns & Ammo?

Likely not going out of business. But, have to scale-back after their pandemic rise. They have competition. Magazines, even digital versions -- who buys those anymore? Plus Besos has that obnoxious boat to compete. That didn't construct itself for free, ya know.

I have three subscriptions.

Princess foofypants had at least 25 subscriptions (and that's a conservative estimate) to various magazines. None digital. Our mail person probably hated her.

[pipistrelle]

Yeah, that's not counting those I get through alumni org and various associations/organizations.

[MN-Skeptic]

My husband and I had many magazine subscriptions over the years, but they diminished as we got more information from the internet. Plus I hated the waste of paper which newspaper and magazines generate. I've converted to online versions of almost all of the magazines and newspapers which I still read. I can also check out online versions of quite a few magazines from my library and read them with the Libby e-reader. I love that!

[RTH10260]

back from November 2022

Amazon To Kill Digital Publication Sales Via Kindle Newsstandby Ray Schultz , December 19, 2022
Amazon will no longer sell digital magazine and newspaper subscriptions via Kindle Newsstand, starting next year.

The tech giant is also phasing out its print textbook rental program, Publishers Weekly reports.

Amazon issued this statement to Publishers Weekly:

“Following an assessment of our print textbook rentals and our magazine and newspaper subscriptions and single-issue sales, we have made the difficult decision to discontinue these services.”

The statement continues, “We don’t take these decisions lightly, and are winding down these offerings in a phased manner over several months. We will continue to support customers, sellers, and publishers during that time.”

The announcement from Amazon rocked small publishers.

“In an absolutely devastating announcement (right before the holidays) Amazon has informed us that they are ending their Kindle Subscription program in 2023 and trying to get magazines to switch to Kindle Unlimited,” Neil Clarke, publisher of Clarkesworld, posted. “Asking for more details, but this is bad.”

Locus reports that some publishers will be able to offer subscriptions in Kindle Unlimited Magazines.



https://www.mediapost.com/publications/ ... kindl.html

(PublishersDaily)

and

Amazon dropping Kindle magazine and newspaper subscriptions effective Sept 2023.
News & Reviews

Got the email below this evening. That's too bad, ALL I used Kindle for was newspaper subscriptions.

And this right here, boys 'n girls, is why a single-point of control at the whims of Big Tech is a Bad Idea.

Dear Amazon Customer,

Thank you for being a valued Amazon Kindle Newsstand subscriber. We are writing to inform you that we have made the decision to stop selling Kindle magazine and newspaper subscriptions on Amazon.

https://www.reddit.com/r/kindle/comment ... newspaper/

[realist]

Well, phooey. That's where I subscribed to my newspapers.

[MN-Skeptic]

I could be wrong, but I thought you ended up paying a premium to subscribe to anything through a provider like Apple or Google or Amazon. I subscribe to a number of online newspapers and news sites and my subscriptions are with them directly. Same for streaming services. I would never go through Apple to subscribe to anything that I could subscribe to directly!

[keith]

Not only but also, what then is the value proposition for a Kindle?

If they are cutting down on the content available, does it mean they are killing off the Kindle product altogether?

[pipistrelle]

Not only but also, what then is the value proposition for a Kindle?

If they are cutting down on the content available, does it mean they are killing off the Kindle product altogether?

I think the model is to get you to pay monthly for Kindle Unlimited, like you do for content channels. I wonder how many people pay attention to how much monthly subscriptions for apps and channels are costing them.

[Kriselda Gray]

Not only but also, what then is the value proposition for a Kindle?

If they are cutting down on the content available, does it mean they are killing off the Kindle product altogether?

They're not *totally* getting rid of magazine subscriptions, they're moving them all to Kindle Unlimited. With that, you pay $10 per month and you can get subscriptions as well as borrowing a huge selection of books, which you can keep as long as they're on KU. KUs been a pretty good deal for me. When I've got the money, I can easily spend $50 to $75 on books in a month (I'm a fast reader,) and so far I've only found a few books I wanted to read that weren't available through it.

[RTH10260]

Amazon cuts 9000 more jobs, bringing 2023 total to 27,000

Tue, Mar 21

The total job losses include redundancies announced in November.

Amazon plans to eliminate 9000 more jobs in the next few weeks, CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff on Monday (local time).

The job cuts would mark the second largest round of layoffs in the company's history, adding to the 18,000 employees the tech giant said it would lay off in January. The company's workforce doubled during the pandemic, however, in the midst of a hiring surge across almost the entire tech sector.

In the memo, Jassy said the second phase of the company's annual planning process completed this month led to the additional job cuts. He said Amazon will still hire in some strategic areas.

“Some may ask why we didn’t announce these role reductions with the ones we announced a couple of months ago. The short answer is that not all of the teams were done with their analyses in the late fall, and rather than rush through these assessments without the appropriate diligence, we chose to share these decisions as we’ve made them so people had the information as soon as possible,” Jassy said.


The job cuts announced Monday will hit profitable areas for the company including its cloud computing unit AWS and its burgeoning advertising business. Twitch, the gaming platform Amazon owns, will also see some layoffs, as well as Amazon's PXT organisations, which handle human resources and other functions.




https://www.1news.co.nz/2023/03/21/amaz ... l-to-27000

[RTH10260]

FTC Slams Amazon with $30.8M Fine for Privacy Violations Involving Alexa and Ring

Jun 03, 2023
Ravie Lakshmanan Privacy / Technology

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Amazon a cumulative $30.8 million over a series of privacy lapses regarding its Alexa assistant and Ring security cameras.

This comprises a $25 million penalty for breaching children's privacy laws by retaining their Alexa voice recordings for indefinite time periods and preventing parents from exercising their deletion rights.

"Amazon's history of misleading parents, keeping children's recordings indefinitely, and flouting parents' deletion requests violated COPPA and sacrificed privacy for profits," FTC's Samuel Levine said.

As part of the court order, the retail giant has been mandated to delete the collected information, including inactive child accounts, geolocation data, and voice recordings, and prohibited from gathering such data to train its algorithms. It's also required to disclose to customers its data retention practices.

Amazon has also agreed to fork out an additional $5.8 million in consumer refunds for breaching users' privacy by permitting any employee or contractor to gain broad and unfettered access to private videos recorded using Ring cameras.



https://thehackernews.com/2023/06/ftc-s ... e-for.html

[RTH10260]

when Amazon cripples your smart home

[RTH10260]

Amazon duped millions into enrolling in Prime, US regulator says in lawsuit
Federal Trade Commission alleges Bezos firm used ‘manipulative and deceptive user-interface designs to trick consumers’

Kari Paul and agencies
Wed 21 Jun 2023 19.35 BST

The US Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon for what it called a years-long effort to enroll consumers without consent into its paid subscription program, Amazon Prime, and making it hard for them to cancel.

The FTC, the US agency charged with consumer protection, filed a federal lawsuit in Seattle, where Amazon is headquartered, alleging that the tech behemoth “ knowingly duped millions of consumers into unknowingly enrolling in Amazon Prime” through a secret project internally called “Iliad.”

The lawsuit marks the first time the agency has brought Amazon to court since its chair Lina Khan took the helm in 2021. Khan, a former antitrust scholar, has been widely expected to take a harder line on tech firms that have for years enjoyed unabated growth and little regulation.

In its complaint, the FTC said Amazon used “manipulative, coercive or deceptive user-interface designs known as ‘dark patterns’ to trick consumers into enrolling in automatically renewing Prime subscriptions”.

It said the option to purchase items on Amazon without subscribing to Prime was more difficult in many cases. It also said that consumers were sometimes presented with a button to complete their transactions – which didn’t clearly state it would also enroll them into Prime.

Company leaders slowed or rejected changes that made canceling the subscription easier, the complaint said. It argued those patterns were in violation of the FTC Act and another law called the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act.

The FTC said that “one of Amazon’s primary business goals – and the primary business goal of Prime – is increasing subscriber numbers”. Antitrust advocates and big tech watchdogs applauded the move and called for more action against the e-commerce giant.



https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... cancel-ftc

[raison de arizona]

FTC Files Antitrust Lawsuit Against Amazon
Among the allegations, the agency charges that Amazon Prime subscribers are incentivized to make the most of their subscription by buying more products.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it had filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon.

In the lawsuit, the FTC, along with the attorneys general of 17 states, call the e-commerce giant a "monopolist" and accuse it of "exploit[ing] its monopolies in ways that enrich Amazon but harm its customers."

FTC Chair Lina Khan said that "today's lawsuit seeks to hold Amazon to account for these monopolistic practices and restore the lost promise of free and fair competition."

In a press release accompanying the lawsuit, the FTC alleges that "Amazon's anticompetitive conduct occurs in two markets—the online superstore market that serves shoppers and the market for online marketplace services purchased by sellers." On its website, Amazon allows third-party merchants to sell products alongside Amazon's offerings. The lawsuit charges that Amazon uses unsavory tactics on competitors, such as making a seller's products harder to find if that seller undercuts Amazon's price for the same product. As a result, "sellers hike prices on their storefronts due to fear of Amazon's penalties" while Amazon's market dominance prevents sellers from going elsewhere.

https://reason.com/2023/09/26/ftc-files ... st-amazon/

[raison de arizona]

FTC Press release,
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/pr ... poly-power

FTC Sues Amazon for Illegally Maintaining Monopoly Power
Amazon’s ongoing pattern of illegal conduct blocks competition, allowing it to wield monopoly power to inflate prices, degrade quality, and stifle innovation for consumers and businesses

[Lani]

About 14 days ago, Chase threatened me to pay a credit card. I don't have a Chase card. I got calls. Lots. Then after hours of calls, I found out that my Amazon purchase price went to a different credit card - Chase. WHICH I DON"T HAVE. Had a "nice" phone call with a Chase threatening caller, but then the caller couldn't figure out what was going on and left me alone.

I was able to pay my Amazon purchase w/o it being sent to Chase. But it wasn't easy. What a mess. Tried for hours, now I've cut off my Amazon credit card too, yippee, and I know I will not have a Chase card ever. What a bunch of trash.

[raison de arizona]

My Amazon credit card is through Chase, fwiw.

[realist]

The FTC said that “one of Amazon’s primary business goals – and the primary business goal of Prime – is increasing subscriber numbers”.

Well DUH!!

[Kriselda Gray]

My Amazon credit card is through Chase, fwiw.

Amazon has 2 credit cards. Their store card, good only at Amazon, is through Synchrony Bank. Their VISA card, good anywhere, is through Chase.

[raison de arizona]

My Amazon credit card is through Chase, fwiw.

Amazon has 2 credit cards. Their store card, good only at Amazon, is through Synchrony Bank. Their VISA card, good anywhere, is through Chase.

Thank you!

[Volkonski]

This summer most of our Amazon deliveries on the North Fork were via Amazon vans. Since getting back to Texoma all our Amazon deliveries have been via the US Postal Service.

Not long ago all our Amazon deliveries in both places were via UPS.