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Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos speaks to the media on the company’s sustainability efforts in Washington on September 19, 2019.

Eric Baradat | AFP | Getty Images

Amazon flooded its search results with irrelevant “defect” ads at the direction of Founder Jeff Bezos, pumping Amazon profits while steering shoppers to higher-priced goods, the Federal Trade Commission alleged in a newly unredacted portion of its antitrust lawsuit against the company.

“At a key meeting, Mr. Bezos directed his executives to ‘[a]ccept more defects’ as a way to increase the total number of advertisements shown and drive up Amazon’s advertising profits,” the FTC wrote in a now-public part of the complaint. The agency said that defect ads referred to those that that are irrelevant or only somewhat relevant to what a user is searching for.

The agency and 17 states sued the company in late September for allegedly using its monopoly power to increase prices across the web while degrading the shopping experience and excluding rivals. The FTC filed a less-redacted version of the complaint on Thursday, which reveals new details about the effect its growing advertising business has had on shoppers and sellers that use its site.

Amazon began running ads on its site over a decade ago, allowing brands and sellers to bid for higher placement in search results to have their product stand out from competitors. The unit has turned into a juggernaut, and one of Amazon’s higher-margin businesses. 

In 2018, Amazon leapfrogged Microsoft to become the third-largest ad platform in the U.S., trailing only Google and Facebook.

Amazon in 2022 began breaking out advertising revenue in its quarterly earnings reports, revealing just how big the business has become. Last month, Amazon said its ad business brought in more than $12 billion in revenue in the third quarter.

Amazon General Counsel David Zapolsky called the initial complaint “wrong on the facts and the law,” and said its actions challenged by the FTC “have helped to spur competition and innovation across the retail industry, and have produced greater selection, lower prices, and faster delivery speeds for Amazon customers and greater opportunity for the many businesses that sell in Amazon’s store.”

Amazon did not immediately provide a statement on the claims against its advertising business, but Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle disputed other aspects of the complaint made public Thursday.

A worse experience for users

According to the new version of the complaint, Amazon’s ads strategy worsened the shopping experience for users.

The proliferation of junk ads led to more relevant organic results being crowded out. In their place, shoppers were served up products that were “plainly not what the customer searched for,” such as an ad for a LA Lakers t-shirt in a search for a Seattle Seahawks t-shirt.

Other results were more puzzling. In one example collected by an Amazon executive, “Buck urine” showed up first in a search for water bottles.

Amazon weighed placing guardrails on ads in search results, but senior executives at the company ultimately determined they shouldn’t be “constrained” by limitations such as how relevant the products were to what shoppers search for.

Even though Amazon knew defect ads worsened the search experience, internal experiments showed the practice had no detrimental effect to its advertising revenue, and therefore its profits. The company went as far as incorporating a “cost of defect” into its ad auction system “to make the most money from its ad auctions.”

“With advertisements being so profitable to Amazon even at higher defect rates, senior Amazon executives agreed, ‘we’d be crazy not to’ increase the number of advertisements shown to shoppers,” the complaint states.

The increase in ads was not just annoying, according to the FTC. It also helped push shoppers toward higher-priced items.

An internal study at Amazon in 2018 found that the median price for sponsored products was higher than that of “neighboring organic content,” according to the complaint, which still redacted the percentage difference between the prices. For an undisclosed percentage of impressions, the study allegedly found, “the [Sponsored Products] price is at least twice that of the organic result.”

“‘[A]s the share of site real estate devoted to sponsored content grows, it becomes harder for customers to undo price effects’ by navigating to lower cost product listings,” the FTC wrote, quoting from the study. “Amazon’s economists also found that as advertising grew, ‘the price difference translates into a material impact on overall site ASP [average sales price].'”

Amazon’s ads strategy not only degraded the experience on the platform for shoppers, but also for third-party sellers, the agency alleges.

Amazon recognized that increasing the amount of advertising drove up the amount it took sellers to get their products in front of shoppers, the FTC alleged. And an Amazon executive explained that the cost, “is likely to be passed down to the customer and result in higher prices for customers,” according to the complaint.

The FTC said that based on public reports, though Amazon engineers found a short-term dip in the number of customers who made purchases when sponsored ads were given prominent placement, those effects “are vastly outweighed in the short term by ad revenue,” the team allegedly said.

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Apple’s WWDC underwhelms on AI, but software gets biggest facelift in over a decade

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Apple's WWDC underwhelms on AI, but software gets biggest facelift in over a decade

Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 09, 2025 in Cupertino, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images

Apple‘s annual developer conference on Monday lacked the splashy announcement that fans are used to seeing at WWDC. There was nothing like the Vision Pro reveal from 2023 or the Apple Intelligence announcement last year.

But there was an important software update that, later this year, will change the way all of Apple’s major devices, from iPhones and Mac laptops to Vision Pro virtual reality headsets, will look. It’s a new design language that runs across all of Apple’s operating systems. The company is calling it Liquid Glass.

For Apple, it’s the first significant redesign of its iPhone operating system since 2013, when the company announced iOS7. Apple says the lock screen will look like it’s made out of glass. Buttons will turn into little glass pills, fluidly sliding over glass rails. And there are new animations, including when answering a phone call.

The unveiling underwhelmed Wall Street, which sent the stock down 1.2% on the day. Investors are pressuring Apple to make big changes to its artificial intelligence strategy, pushing it to match the frontier models capabilities of rivals such as Google and OpenAI.

“Many of the AI features announced were more incremental in our view, and already available through competitor applications,” UBS analyst David Vogt wrote in a note on Monday. He has the equivalent of a hold rating on the stock.

Last year, Apple announced Apple Intelligence, its response to ChatGPT, complete with a demo of a “more personal” Siri that could intelligently parse through emails and messages to figure out the best time to make a restaurant reservation. Apple delayed the feature in March, had to pull ads that depicted it, and provided no update on timing on Monday.

“This work needed more time to meet our high quality bar,” Apple software chief Craig Federighi said on Monday. He restated the company’s “the coming year” timeline.

Liquid glass design

Apple’s focus at WWDC was on providing new features and animations across its software that are “delightful,” in CEO Tim Cook’s words.

The new design language is heavy on transparent buttons, sliders, and other interaction elements. Users will be able to spot it as soon as they upgrade their phones to the new iOS, which will be available for beta testing this summer.

Apple announces liquid glass during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 9, 2025 in Cupertino, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Instead of hard, sharp corners in rectangular windows, Apple’s new design language has curved corners that match the device.

One reason Apple gave for rolling out the update now is that its computers and chips have become powerful enough to handle it. Apple said that its new look was directly inspired by the look of VisionOS, the company’s software for Vision Pro.

“Apple Silicon has become dramatically more powerful — enabling software, materials and experiences we once could only dream of,” Federighi said in a recorded video.

As with many Apple announcements, reactions are all over the map. Some people on social media were excited while others compared the update to the look of Windows Vista, which was released in 2007.

While Apple didn’t make many significant changes to the Siri experience, the company did introduce a few significant improvements and changes to its AI capabilities.

Apple also expanded its integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, integrating its image generation capabilities into an app that previously only used Apple’s technology.

When a user takes a screenshot on an iPhone, a new button will send the image to ChatGPT, which can summarize blocks of text in the image, or even decipher what’s happening.

One major improvement Apple is rolling out is in language translation.

During a phone call between two people who don’t speak the same language, the phone app can translate a sentence after it’s spoken and use an AI-generated voice to speak to the other party in the their language. Apple says the feature uses AI processed on the iPhone and doesn’t require a connection to a server.

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Little information from Apple on Siri AI upgrade 'disappointing', says Maxim's Tom Forte

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

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Microsoft enters portable gaming with new ROG Xbox Ally devices

Microsoft ROG Xbox Ally and Ally X Handheld devices

Source: Xbox

Microsoft Xbox players will soon be able to take their favorite games anywhere with the launch of the new ROG Xbox Ally handhelds.

This is a first for Xbox, which has never released a handheld before.

The devices, developed in collaboration with ASUS, offer a full-screen Xbox experience meant for portable play.

Players will be able to access Xbox games, stream content, and play on the go with built-in support for cloud gaming.

“Players can look forward to an approachable gaming experience that travels with you wherever you go, featuring several new and first-of-their kind features on both devices,” Microsoft said in a press release.

The announcement follows last week’s debut of Nintendo‘s flagship Switch 2 and sets the stage for a new chapter in portable gaming.

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Vantage raises $820 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

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Vantage raises 0 million in a first-of-its-kind cloud and AI data center deal in Europe

U.S. data center operator Vantage has raised 720 million euros ($821.4 million) — the first of its kind deal in Europe.

The asset-backed securitization (ABS) deal, the first ever euro-denominated with data center assets on the continent, involves four data centers in Germany.

The company said it will be paying on average a 4.3% coupon on the bonds issued through the process.

In an ABS, Vantage raises money by using its data center infrastructure and future revenues from the facilities as collateral.

Vantage said it will use the funds primarily to pay off existing construction loans previously secured for the facilities.

“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Sharif Metwalli, chief financial officer of Vantage Data Centers, told CNBC.

Vantage added that despite the large sum borrowed, the demand from investors exceeded the amount raised.

“So this transaction was actually pretty highly levered, frankly,” Rich Cosgray, senior vice president of global capital markets at Vantage Data Centers told CNBC. “It was higher leverage than our prior transaction and we had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level.”

“Yet, despite that, we were basically two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings, and we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process,” Cosgray added.

The four facilities — two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt — have access to around 55 megawatts of power and “are fully leased to hyperscale customers,” the company said in a statement. The four facilities were valued at more than $1 billion earlier this year.

Last year, Vantage also raised £600 million through the first-ever securitization of a data center in Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). The deal involved two units from the company’s Cardiff campus with 148 megawatts of electricity power. Across the region, the company has 2,500 megawatts of data center capacity either operational or under development.

The transaction was led by Barclays Bank and Deutsche Bank as joint lead managers and Vantage was represented by the British law firm Clifford Chance.

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