Amazon Wins Court Order To Block Perplexity's AI Shopping Bots (cnbc.com) 29
Last November, Amazon sued Perplexity demanding that the AI search startup stop allowing its AI browser agent, Comet, to make purchases for users online. Today, a judge ruled in favor of the tech giant, granting it a temporary court injunction blocking the scraping of Amazon's website. According to court filings, the judge found strong evidence the tool accessed the retailer's systems "without authorization." CNBC reports: In a ruling dated Monday, U.S. District Judge Maxine Chesney wrote that Amazon has provided "strong evidence" that Perplexity's Comet browser accessed its website at the user's direction, but "without authorization" from the e-commerce giant. Chesney said Amazon submitted "essentially undisputed evidence" that it spent more than $5,000 to respond to the issue, including "numerous hours" where its employees worked to develop tools to block Comet from accessing its private customer tools and to prevent the tool from "future unauthorized access." "Given such evidence, the Court finds Amazon has shown a likelihood of success on the merits of its claim," Chesney wrote.
Chesney's ruling includes a weeklong stay to allow Perplexity to appeal the order. Amazon wrote in its original complaint that Perplexity's agents posed security risks to customer data because they "can act within protected computer systems, including private customer accounts requiring a password." The company also said Perplexity's agents created challenges for the company's advertising business, because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be detected and filtered out before advertisers can be billed. "This requires modifications to Amazon's advertising systems, including developing new detection mechanisms to identify and exclude automated traffic," Amazon wrote in its complaint. "These system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions."
Chesney's ruling includes a weeklong stay to allow Perplexity to appeal the order. Amazon wrote in its original complaint that Perplexity's agents posed security risks to customer data because they "can act within protected computer systems, including private customer accounts requiring a password." The company also said Perplexity's agents created challenges for the company's advertising business, because when AI systems generate ad traffic, the impressions have to be detected and filtered out before advertisers can be billed. "This requires modifications to Amazon's advertising systems, including developing new detection mechanisms to identify and exclude automated traffic," Amazon wrote in its complaint. "These system adaptations are necessary to maintain contractual obligations with advertisers who pay only for legitimate human impressions."
Reasons (Score:3)
Who gives a f**k if Amazon "authorized" it? (Score:5, Interesting)
An action performed on behalf of the user is per se authorized by the retailer, because the retailer is selling to the user, and authorizes the user to retrieve content from their site as part of buying things from them. It should make no difference whether that action is performed by a bot, the Amazon app, or a web browser on behalf of the user. The user intent is the same, the user is still driving the action, and the end result is the same. The only difference is how much time the user wastes in the process.
What Amazon is really saying is that by giving users control, their dogs**t search system won't be able to shove overpriced, low-quality trash at users anymore, and people won't occasionally be tricked into buying trash because they can't find what they're actually looking for.
Wah. Don't care. This is a great opportunity for the doomhammer of antitrust to come crashing down on Amazon's bulls**t.
That said, the right response is for Perplexity to support every vendor except Amazon. Make it more convenient for people to search for things and find things from everybody else but them. Then advertise their service with ads where people talk about how much money they saved by not buying things from Amazon. Sit back and watch as users write off Amazon as too greedy for their own good.
I like their anti-bot stance, though, vs Facebook (Score:2)
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99% of all the problems on the web are caused by bots...election interference, boosting follower counts of dangerous people, basic scams, etc. Twitter and Facebook tolerate Russian bot farms and bill it to advertisers as "engagement."
Yeah, but there's a huge difference between a small number of people using bots to deliberately deceive people in a way that deliberately devalues the platform for all other users and a large number of people using bots to improve the usability of the platform and increase its value for themselves and others. The first is barely even quasi-legal. The other is shopping, which is literally doing what Amazon is built for users to do.
So as much as I hate Amazon, I hate bots even more and I appreciate that they're billing advertisers for human traffic, not bot. I am confident bots swayed major elections in the USA in favor of Russian-backed candidates....why?...because Facebook and Twitter didn't want to do basic anti-bot measures offered by every major security provider because they were enjoying overbilling their customers.
Here's the thing. 100% of ads on Amazon's website itself are detrimental to
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As if *.ai knows "best". Most popular or most likely or lowest price perhaps. But, since a bot has never worn a pair of socks or cast a dry-fly with a bamboo fly-rod the BOT has no concept of good/better/best. Humans OTOH revel and mature by creating "best" objects in their awareness thru sensory experience.
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This is about agents (basically automating your browser) and not bots (like the Google crawler).
You wouldn't be so confident if you've used agents (Score:2)
This is about agents (basically automating your browser) and not bots (like the Google crawler).
Agreed, but how reliable do you think they are? How confident are you that an agent is working on behalf of the user and not an attacker...or that it wasn't hijacked? I use Claude Sonnet and Opus 4.6 daily. I still get compiler errors daily when giving it simple tasks. I can't trust it with most refactors....and while they're in a different market than Perplexity, they're generally regarded as superior to most other LLMs. So I am going to trust it to purchase things on my behalf?...hard no...but that's
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I am not convinced of most current agents. But as long as the user is responsible for the outcome (i.e. has to pay for the purchase), it is none of Amazon's business if the user used an agent or not. Otherwise we can quickly get into the "Access only allowed without adblocker" territory.
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Spot the chap who didn't go to law school and who has never heard of a website imposing terms and conditions of use on its customers.
Spotted the chap who didn't go to law school and doesn't understand that at least in the U.S., posting terms and conditions on your website doesn't mean they'll hold up in court.
Unless you require the user to explicitly agree to the terms and conditions before browsing, any argument that the T&C apply to a bot is likely to be laughed out of court. After all, the person using the bot never agreed to those terms before performing a search, and the person would not have agreed to those terms before perfor
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Let them fight! (Score:2)
nt.
Hollow Victory?? (Score:2)
Bots shopping is clearly the future and if Amazon is not part of it, the bots will go elsewhere.
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Bots shopping is clearly the future
Clearly the future sucks.
Re:Hollow Victory?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bots shopping is clearly the future
Clearly the future sucks.
If you've never spent an hour manually clicking through twenty or thirty pages of Amazon search results while trying to find something on Amazon because you have specific requirements that their search engine completely ignores and you have timing constraints on when you have to have it, then maybe you're not the target market for bot shopping.
If you have done that, you understand why people want bots. Amazon has perverse incentives to promote products that pay them more money, even if those products don't meet your needs, because they know that unless it annoys you enough to shop somewhere else, you'll just skip through those.
But the bots always ignore those ads. They search for what you are looking for. They eliminate the annoyance, and in so doing, eliminate Amazon's opportunity to trick you into buying something that's not quite what you're looking for, but that gives them a bigger profit. Bots are to online shopping as personal shoppers are to grocery shopping. Those fancy end caps are no match for someone with a specific list of things to buy for someone else.
Amazon hates this. But that doesn't mean they should have any legal right to stop it in any sane universe.
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I agree with you on the lawsuit, but all I see is a different company using a different piece of technology to direct you towards products that pay them incentives.
That seems unlikely. Directing you to websites that pay them incentives, maybe, but it would be way harder for the product manufacturers to do so, because there an extra layer of indirection in there, and it would be hard for them to prove that they indirectly sold something so that they get paid.
Either way, if they do, then some other bot will come along that doesn't do that, and they will be replaced by the better bot. It's a lot easier to replace a bot than a shopping platform, because the latter requi
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But if I need something 'now' I can find what I want even through the crap results. I can see how someone that doesn't want to learn to shop in the first place could be helped by some form of bot, to a point.
Just like bots, the retailers hate my type of shopping as I actually consider every purchase and don't fall for end-cap type displays, special limited time deal
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But if I need something 'now' I can find what I want even through the crap results. I can see how someone that doesn't want to learn to shop in the first place could be helped by some form of bot, to a point.
There have been times I've literally gone through high double-digit pages on Amazon trying to find a product before finding one that met by requirements. That's high-double-digit *results* pages with ~15 items per page or whatever. So O(1,000) items looked at. And that's with my best attempts at keywords, which mostly don't help because Amazon handles them in weird ways and has no negative keywording as far as I can tell.
As a shopper waiting for 'my price' to arrive, bots suck as they snipe the deals causing it to sell out before normal human shoppers even know it's on sale. Most of those bot buys are usually flipped on Ebay making it just plain stupid.
Strong reason to have sales that are time-based and not quantity-based.
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Re: Hollow Victory?? (Score:2)
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Somewhat like the VHS era idea that taping shows was a copyright infringement, which quickly morphed into a drive for people to tape/watch shows (ads and all) I suspect this will not turn out well for Amazon. Bots shopping is clearly the future and if Amazon is not part of it, the bots will go elsewhere.
Amazon wants to develop and run their own bots, so they can have people pay them to shop on their own site. That's really all this is about.
Cry harder (Score:2)
Whaaaaaa we're having trouble feeding advertisements to users, users who don't want them and don't want to be manipulated and have this shoved into their face all the time...whaaaaaa
Listen to me not care. Advertisers can stuff it.
Buried the lead? (Score:5, Interesting)
Last paragraph in the article:
Amazon has broadly locked down its shopping sites from AI agents, blocking dozens of agents, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while investing in its homegrown tools like Rufus, a shopping assistant featured on its website and app.
Way to bury the lead. Company with a history of anti-competitive practices sues competitor. News at 11.
PS. For what it's worth, Amazon's point that Perplexity inadvertently messes up Amazon's contracts with advertisers "who pay only for legitimate human impressions" does seem interesting. I guess they're inadvertently over-billing their advertisers. I'll be curious to see how this develops.
pre vscreen (Score:1)
Bad News (Score:2)
No matter if you like to use AI or not, they are banning a browser feature. Other than the LLM itself, browser agents run on your machine and the order basically prescribes how you can use your browser. Are you still allowed to use a screen reader? Custom keyboard shortcuts? Who knows.
Sites should not be allowed to require how a client may be controlled by the user.
Always bet on the larger fish (Score:2)