FTC, States Sue Amazon over Secret Ad Surcharge Scheme

As a result, the complaint alleges that Amazon’s scheme has likely extracted tens of billions of dollars from its unwitting advertising customers.

Aren't most on-line "ad auctions" really "black boxes" --- the only one with an overall view of what is actually going on is the auctioneer. Bidders are really flying blind and operating on trust.

It would be interesting to see more about how they were able to access "internal documents" to peek inside Amazon's process. And why Amazon was dumb enough to document it.