You're not imagining it. The ad budgets feel bigger every quarter, the returns feel thinner, and the platform's explanation never quite adds up.
On September 1, 2026, the FTC and 22 state attorneys general filed suit against Amazon in Seattle federal court, alleging the company secretly and systematically overcharged more than one million advertisers by over $20 billion since 2019. More than 500,000 of those advertisers were small and medium businesses. The core allegation: Amazon publicly described its ad system as a "second price" auction — where winners pay one cent more than the second-highest bid — but then applied hidden surcharges that inflated what advertisers actually paid after the auction closed. Amazon has denied wrongdoing, arguing that winning bids fell 50% from 2019 to 2024 as its relevancy models improved. But regulators say the description of the auction itself was false.
I'm not here to litigate the lawsuit. That's the FTC's job. What I want to talk about is what this reveals about the situation every operator is already in.
When you run paid ads on any major platform — Amazon, Google, Meta — you are participating in an auction you do not control, cannot fully observe, and whose pricing rules can change without your explicit notice. You set a bid. You trust the auction to execute it fairly. You check your cost-per-click, your ROAS, your conversion rate, and you make decisions based on those numbers. But if the platform is also setting a floor, adding a surcharge, or weighting the results in a way it hasn't disclosed, your data isn't telling you the full story. You're optimizing inside a black box.
This is a revenue operations problem, not just a marketing problem. Most operators I talk to track ad spend as a cost of doing business — it's in the budget, it gets reviewed quarterly, and as long as it's producing some return, it stays. The harder question to ask is: what percentage of your customer acquisition is happening on terms you don't control? And what would break in your business if a platform changed those terms overnight?
The FTC case against Amazon is one extreme. But the underlying pattern isn't extreme at all. It's the normal operating environment for any business that depends on rented attention.
The response isn't to abandon paid advertising. It still works, and for many businesses at certain stages, it's the fastest path to volume. The response is to treat any single platform's pricing as a variable you're actively working to reduce, not a fixed cost you accept.
That means a few concrete things:
First, build a baseline of owned visibility — email lists, organic content, direct referral networks — that doesn't reset to zero if a platform changes its algorithm or its pricing structure. You don't need to own 100% of your acquisition to have real leverage. You need enough owned channels that you could absorb a platform shock without a revenue crisis.
Second, track what each platform actually costs you — not just cost-per-click, but cost-per-customer acquired from that platform, and cost-per-dollar-retained from customers who came through that platform. These numbers often tell a different story than the dashboard the platform wants you to look at. If you're only seeing platform-reported metrics, you're seeing what the platform has an incentive for you to see.
Third, diversify your spend across platforms before you have to. The operators who panic when Amazon changes its fee structure, or when Meta's reach drops, are the ones who let one platform carry 80% of their paid acquisition budget for years. The ones who don't panic are the ones who treated single-platform dependency as a risk to hedge, not a convenience to keep.
The Amazon lawsuit may result in billions in penalties, or it may be settled quietly two years from now for less. Either way, the 500,000 small businesses named in the complaint will see whatever resolution regulators can produce. What you can control is whether your business is structured so that a platform's pricing decisions — disclosed or otherwise — have a limited blast radius.
The platform didn't promise to put your interests first. It promised to give you access to its audience. Those are two very different things. Building like you understand the difference is how you protect your margins regardless of how this particular lawsuit resolves.