Amazon and the Federal Trade Commission are squaring off in a long-awaited trial over whether the company duped users into paying for Prime memberships.

The lawsuit, filed by the FTC in June 2023 under the Biden administration, alleges that Amazon deceived tens of millions of customers into signing up for its Prime subscription program and sabotaged their attempts to cancel it. Amazon has denied any wrongdoing.

The trial is being held in a federal court in Seattle, Amazon’s backyard. Jury selection began Monday and opening arguments are slated for Tuesday, with the trial expected to last about a month.

Launched in 2005, Amazon’s Prime program has grown to become one of the most popular subscription services in the world, with more than 200 million members globally, and it has generated billions of dollars for the company. Membership costs $139 a year and includes perks like free shipping and access to streaming content. Data has shown that Prime members spend more and shop more often than non-Prime members.

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos famously said the company wanted Prime “to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”

Regulators argue that Amazon broke competition and consumer protection laws by tricking customers into subscribing to Prime. They pointed to examples like a button on its site that instructed users to complete their transaction and did not clearly state they were also agreeing to join Prime for a recurring subscription.

“Millions of consumers accidentally enrolled in Prime without knowledge or consent, but Amazon refused to fix this known problem, described internally by employees as an ‘unspoken cancer’ because clarity adjustments would lead to a drop in subscribers,” the agency wrote in a court filing last week.

The FTC says that the cancellation process is equally confusing, requiring users to navigate four webpages and choose from 15 options — a “labyrinthian mechanism” that the company referred to internally as “Iliad,” referencing Homer’s epic poem about the Trojan War.

Amazon has argued that the Prime sign up and cancellation processes are “clear and simple,” adding that the company has “always been transparent about Prime’s terms.”

“Occasional customer frustrations and mistakes are inevitable — especially for a program as popular as Amazon Prime,” the company wrote in a recent court filing. “Evidence that a small percentage of customers misunderstood Prime enrollment or cancellation does not prove that Amazon violated the law.”

The FTC notched an early win in the case last week when U.S. District Court Judge John Chun ruled Amazon and two senior executives violated the Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act by gathering Prime members’ billing information before disclosing the terms of the service.

Chun also said that the two senior Amazon executives would be individually liable if a jury sides with the FTC due to the level of oversight they maintained over the Prime enrollment and cancellation process.

Amazon’s Prime boss Jamil Ghani and Neil Lindsay, a senior vice president in its health division who previously oversaw Prime’s technology and business operations, are named defendants in the complaint.

Russell Grandinetti, Amazon senior vice president of international consumer, is also named in the suit, but Chun argued he had “less involvement in the operation of the Prime organization” compared to Ghani and Lindsay.

Chun also scolded attorneys for Amazon in July for withholding thousands of documents from the FTC and abusing a legal privilege to shield them from scrutiny. Among the documents was a 2020 email where Amazon’s retail chief Doug Herrington said “subscription driving” was a “shady” practice and referred to Bezos as the company’s “chief dark arts officer.”

Representatives from Amazon didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Amazon also faces a separate lawsuit brought by the FTC in 2023 accusing it of wielding an illegal monopoly. That case is set to go to trial in February 2027.

The Prime case is part of the FTC’s broader crackdown on so-called “dark patterns,” which it began examining in 2022. The phrase refers to deceptive design tactics meant to steer users toward buying products or services or giving up their privacy.

The agency brought a similar dark patterns lawsuit against Uber in April, accusing the ride-hailing and delivery company of deceptive billing and cancellation practices tied to its Uber One subscription service. Uber has disputed the FTC’s allegations.

Earlier this year, it reached settlements with online dating service Match and online education firm Chegg over claims that their subscription practices were deceptive or hard to cancel.

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U.S. President Donald Trump’s plans to place $100,000 fees on H-1B visa applications will disproportionately harm America’s startup space, founders and venture capitalists told CNBC this week.

H-1B visas — which allow companies to temporarily hire foreign workers in skilled occupations such as IT, healthcare and engineering — were already difficult to secure for U.S. startups, due to limited annual quotas. 

Over the past year, Desmond Lim, CEO and co-founder of HR, payroll and hiring tech platform Workstream, said all of his startup’s H1-B applications had been rejected — something he called “very disappointing” as he tries to secure more top engineering talent.

The year prior, however, Workstream did secure a couple of H-1B hires that Lim told CNBC were “life changing, both for the employees and for the company.”

“As an early-stage startup, every hire is precious, and we only choose the best to go through the H-1B program, because it not only costs money, but also takes time,” he added. 

Now, securing this talent is set to become even harder. The White House plans to require companies to pay a $100,000 fee when submitting petitions for new H-1B visas, though many details remain unclear.

Lim said the fee would be too high to justify for early-stage companies like his, complicating recruitment strategies.

A 2020 survey found that startups hiring workers through the H-1B visa process were associated with an increase in the likelihood of obtaining external funding, going public or being acquired, and of making innovative breakthroughs.

Now, the new fee could “dampen PE and VC appetite for early-stage U.S. names that rely heavily on H-1B workers, many of whom may now look abroad to secure their careers rather than risk further uncertainty in the U.S.,” Crossbridge Capital’s Chief Investment Officer Manish Singh told CNBC in an email Monday. 

Singh added that changes to the visa program could instead create a stronger case for investors to deploy capital into markets such as the U.K., Canada and Europe. 

“U.S. startups may experience reduced funding momentum, while Europe could see a relative uplift in both talent inflows and investor attention,” he added. 

Many markets, including in Europe, have been reporting problems with “brain-drain” in recent years, referring to a phenomenon where skilled and educated workers emigrate to seek better opportunities in countries such as the U.S. 

This movement is often associated with the development of high-skilled industries and entrepreneurship in the receiving country.

Now, uncertainty surrounding U.S. immigration, including the H-1 B development, could be a real turning point for tech talent that has been on the fence about moving to the U.S., said Laura Willming, head of people and talent at Octopus Ventures, one of Europe’s most active venture capital investors. 

Talented individuals who once saw the U.S. as the obvious destination are now seriously considering other markets, such as the U.K. and Europe, to build their careers, she added.

— CNBC’s Hugh Leask and Ernestine Siu contributed to this report

India wants to become a global chip major, but the odds are steep: competition is fierce, and India is a late entrant in the race to make the most advanced chips.

In 2022, when the U.S. restricted exports of its advanced AI chips to China to curb Beijing’s access to cutting-edge technology, a global race for semiconductor self-reliance began.

For India, it offered an opportunity: the country wants to reduce dependence on imports, secure chips for strategic sectors, and capture a bigger share of the global electronics market shifting away from China.

India is one of the world’s largest consumers of electronics, but it has no local chip industry and plays a minimal role in the global supply chain. New Delhi’s “Semiconductor Mission” aims to change that.

The ambition is bold. It wants to create a full supply chain — from design to fabrication, testing and packaging — on Indian soil.

As of this month, the country has approved 10 semiconductor projects with total investment of 1.6 trillion rupees ($18.2 billion). These include two semiconductor fabrication plants, and multiple testing and packing factories.

India also has a pool of engineering talent that is already employed by global chip design companies.

Yet progress so far has been uneven, and neither the investments nor talent pool is enough to make India’s chip ambitions a reality, say experts.

“India needs more than a few fabs or ATP facilities (i.e., more than a few “shiny objects.”) It needs a dynamic and deep and long-term ecosystem,” said Stephen Ezell, vice president for global innovation policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a science and technology policy think tank.

Ezell says that leading semiconductor manufacturers consider “as many as 500 discrete factors” before they set up multi-billion-dollar fab investments. These include talent, tax, trade, technology policies, labor rates and laws and customs policies — all areas where India has work to do.

The unit will make chips for power management integrated circuits, display drivers, microcontrollers and high-performance computing logic, Tata Electronics said, which can be used in AI, automotive, computing and data storage industries.

The U.K.’s Clas-SiC Wafer Fab has also tied up with India’s SiCSem to set up the country’s first commercial compound fab in the eastern state of Odisha.

These compound semiconductors can be used in missiles, defence equipment, electric vehicles, consumer appliances and solar power inverters, according to a government press release.

“The coming 3-4 years is pivotal for advancing India’s semiconductor goals,” said Sujay Shetty, managing director of semiconductor at PwC India.

Establishing operational silicon fabrication facilities and overcoming technical and infrastructural hurdles that extend beyond incentives will be a key milestone, according to Shetty.

These 2nm chips offer better performance and power efficiency due to their smaller transistor size. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation will start mass-producing cutting-edge 2nm chips later this year, according to an FT report.

Last week, Indian minister Ashwini Vaishnaw, who was in Bengaluru to inaugurate a new office of semiconductor design firm ARM, said the British company will design the “most advanced chips used in AI servers, drones, mobile phone chips of 2 nm” from the south Indian city.

But experts say the role of local talent is likely to be limited to non-core design testing and validation, as the core intellectual property for chip designs is often held in locations like the U.S. or Singapore, where established IP regimes support such activities.

“India has sufficient talent in design space, because unlike semiconductor manufacturing and testing that has come up in the last 2 years, design has been there since 1990s,” said Jayanth BR, a recruiter with over 15 years of experience in hiring for global semiconductor companies in India.

He said global companies usually outsource “block-level” design validation work to India.

Going beyond this is something India’s government will need to solve if it wants to fulfil its semiconductor ambitions.

“India may consider updating its IP laws to address new forms of IP, like digital content and software. Of course, improving enforcement mechanisms will go a long way in protecting IP rights,” says Sajai Singh, a partner at Mumbai-based JSA Advocates & Solicitors.

“Our competition is with countries like the U.S., Europe, and Taiwan, which not only have strong IP laws, but also a more established ecosystem for chip design.”