Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
law.justia.com199 points by neom 9 hours ago
199 points by neom 9 hours ago
Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.
> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads
No, the threat is bigger than that. If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying SaaS (or e-commerce website) becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
>If AI automatically places orders on Amazon's site, tomorrow it could place the order on another company's site, and the user won't know the difference.
Agree that is a big-time longer-term threat but "user won't know the difference" means the user gets the order with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc...that won't be replicated overnight, at least not at scale (interesting to think what products could be done first...similar to Amazon starting with books).
Meanwhile ads made Amazon $19.8 billion last quarter alone, even while detracting from our user experience. Can't rip that business away overnight either, but it is less of a lift imo.
"with parity in delivery time, product quality, returns experience, etc."
How would the user know that? Many sites, including Amazon, make their bones providing decent quality at a lower cost, and then once they build up their market they start reducing the features and raising the costs. Amazon tends to be more expensive nowadays and suffers from product quality issues. It is super easy to use and has a good return experience, but it used to be a leader in all four areas.
And the AI replacement will be incentivized to do the same thing. And so will the LLM provider, etc. All businesses do this - once they acquire a dominant position, they start screwing over the customer.
Still can’t beat the delivery time though. Their logistics network is insane.
Not everyone is optimizing for time. The agents will give you the choice of what you want to optimize for.
So you can just tell your agent "Hey X order me a Nintendo Switch 2. I want it by the weekend." Then it will order it for you from whoever has the cheapest price that conforms to the given criteria.
If the local agent has access to your digital wallet (Apple pay or Google pay) and your email then it has all it needs to perform and verify the transaction.
Delivery time is super important--50% of the time. Maybe less than 50%. I never pay for express shipping on personal orders. One or two days is never worth $3 cost to me. Let alone a $12-20 charge.
I suspect super fast delivery is only a differentiator when all else is equal. At $6+/gal diesel, I'll take the cheaper item delivered by bicycle in a week. (A bit of a joke, but you get the point.)
I ordered something the other day from another website and it was $9 cheapest shipping option and took 5 days. When all Prime is 1-2 day “free” delivery for me, that’s hard to beat.
For me small things are generally cheaper on Aliexpress.
Amazon drivers are also terrible in my area. They leave parcels as soon as the app tells them they can (it's done via GPS) so sometimes that is on top of an apartment block mailbox on a main road with high foot traffic.
Amazon prime was costing me 20$/order so I cancelled it a while ago. Which made many sites competitive with Amazon on shipping.
As to delivery times, many things could take 2 weeks to show up and I wouldn’t care. The range where I can wait 18+ hours but can’t wait ~1 week just doesn’t cover that many of my purchases.
Not really. They’re a day or more late most of the time in the major metro where I live. Usually only when I’m relying on them.
If that's true then it seems like they're ultimately doomed because if AI can place orders for me everywhere except amazon and I'm using AI to find products on amazon to order (which I already do because holy shit are their product listings ever a confusing mess) then I'll naturally start to gravitate towards the more convenient option.
Amazon cannot even sort by price. An AI that gives me a list of Amazon products sorted by price will instantly replace Amazon for me.
What about the end game where my own computer running my own code controls the experience? There's a 10 trillion dollar incentive to never allow that reality.
> You have to own the consumer experience. If AI owns the consumer experience, the underlying product becomes interchangeable and commoditized.
Ironically, this is what Amazon did to local business owners. Now that the tables are turned (and they have billions to spend on lawyers), they see the threat.
> You have to own the consumer experience.
No, we have to own it.
I'm so tired of these abusive control freak corporations. I'm actually starting to look forward to these "unaligned" AIs which are just going to ignore all of this nonsense whether they like it or not.
Disintermediation.
It's Amazon's whole business model.
https://prosperousamerica.org/amazons-heavy-recruitment-of-c...
I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!
To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:
> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."
I don't necessarily know if I see it this way.
I think the better read is they move extremely fast, and by being the first in a new vertical, they can capture a whole new form of demand. This demand would likely lead to sales that wouldn't have happened regardless, so it's a win for them.
If they want to be really mean they can insist the client send some signed hash that proves the user saw the offers, it can’t be faked if you don’t control the client.
You can run adblock in the browser to block those too. Most don't bother, just like they won't bother to have a custom AGENTS.md to block all these offers.
No, I mean the dd server can deny completion of the transaction unless the client has provably seen the offer content. All the DRM standards are in place, this isn’t anonymous browsing, it’s easily controlled if they want to.
They could also make it such that any client caught sidestepping is hit with a DMCA violation.
you need to expand your creative imagination around the limits of enshittification, there are really so many ways to make the experience shittier
As long as the client supports external display/input (e.g. USB-C with DP alt mode) you could always attach a KVM and run a proxy with vision capabilities to filter.
for the company/account placing DD orders via CLI, instant ban hammer.
you don’t seem to understand, sure clients can block ads. servers can also refuse to proceed unless a provable step is taken, and that’s linked to your DD integration. Bad actors can easily been detected
I'm saying the client can take the action, but the user never sees the client because they interact with it through e.g. their AdBuster box, a glorified PiKVM that interacts with client, OCRs it, and produces simple filtered HTML for the user.
As long as you can attach a display and USB inputs, your "monitor" or "braille device" can go straight to a vision model, which can then send inputs from your "keyboard". There are already off the shelf devices that can do this if you install an agent harness.
Like an ad blocking DVR for the 2020s.