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Two separate FTC cases against Amazon are routinely confused. The Prime dark patterns case settled for $2.5 billion in September 2025. The antitrust monopolization case is still headed for trial in Seattle.
There are two FTC cases against Amazon, and most coverage blends them. One is a consumer protection case about how Prime subscriptions were sold and cancelled. It settled in September 2025 for a record amount. The other is an antitrust monopolization case in Seattle that has never settled and is still headed for trial.
Getting them straight is the first step to following either one.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Caption | Federal Trade Commission v. Amazon.com, Inc. |
| Court | U.S. District Court, Western District of Washington |
| Judge | John H. Chun |
| Filed | September 2023, joined by 17 state attorneys general |
| Claims | Sherman Act section 2 monopolization, plus FTC Act section 5 and parallel state claims |
| Trial | Set for October 13, 2026 |
| Status | Pretrial; some state law claims dismissed in April 2026 |
The FTC alleges that Amazon maintains monopolies in two markets, the online superstore market for shoppers and the market for online marketplace services sold to sellers, and that it protects them through conduct that has nothing to do with offering a better product.
Two practices anchor the complaint. The first is anti-discounting: sellers who list a lower price elsewhere find their Amazon visibility punished, so the lower price disappears from the rest of the internet. The second is the practical tying of Prime eligibility to Amazon's own fulfillment service, which the agency says forces sellers who want the Prime badge to use Amazon logistics whether or not it is the best option for them.
Amazon's answer is that it is competing hard in a market that includes Walmart, Target, and every other retailer, that highlighting lower prices elsewhere is ordinary retail behavior, and that sellers use its fulfillment because it works.
Judge Chun let the core federal claims proceed past the motion to dismiss and, in April 2026, dismissed a set of state law claims while rejecting Amazon's request to combine liability and remedy evidence in a single phase.
The Prime case is a different lawsuit with different claims. The FTC alleged that Amazon used dark patterns to enroll shoppers in Prime and built a cancellation flow designed to stop people from leaving rather than to let them leave.
On September 25, 2025, the FTC announced a $2.5 billion settlement: a $1 billion civil penalty plus $1.5 billion in refunds to an estimated 35 million customers, with eligible customers receiving up to $51. It is the largest civil penalty the agency has obtained under the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act.
That settlement resolved nothing in the antitrust case. Different statute, different court, different conduct. Anyone reading the Prime headline as the end of the FTC's Amazon litigation has the wrong case.
Section 2 requires monopoly power in a properly defined market plus exclusionary conduct. Market definition is the whole ballgame here. If the market is "online superstores," Amazon's share is very large. If it is retail, it is not.
On conduct, the FTC has to show these practices exclude rivals rather than merely making Amazon a tough competitor. Antitrust law protects competition, not competitors, and courts have been reluctant to condemn conduct that lowers consumer prices. The anti-discounting theory is interesting precisely because the FTC argues it raises prices everywhere else.
Watch the trial date. The FTC has previously told the court its resource constraints were, in its lawyer's words, "severe and really unique to this moment," and asked for a delay. Trial dates in cases of this scale move.
Watch the remedy structure. Judge Chun kept liability and remedy separate, which means a plaintiff verdict would be followed by a second proceeding to decide what to do about it. That is the same two-step that has kept the Google search case alive for years after the liability finding.
Pull the current filings here: FTC v. Amazon. Pretrial practice in the months before an antitrust trial produces motions in limine, expert challenges, and sealed exhibit disputes in rapid succession, so case alerts will catch them faster than a manual check.
Antitrust cases are won and lost on the definition of the market before anyone argues about conduct.
The standard tool is the hypothetical monopolist test. Ask whether a firm controlling all sellers of the proposed product in the proposed area could profitably impose a small but significant non-transitory price increase. If customers would switch to something outside the proposed market in numbers that defeat the increase, the market is drawn too narrowly.
The FTC proposes an online superstore market for shoppers and a market for online marketplace services sold to sellers. Amazon's answer is that shoppers move fluidly between it, Walmart, Target, and thousands of direct sellers, and that a market drawn around online superstores is an artifact of litigation rather than a description of how anyone shops.
Expert economists will testify to both. Whoever the jury believes on this point has probably won, and everything about the anti-discounting and fulfillment evidence is downstream of it.
Seventeen state attorneys general joined the case. State antitrust and consumer protection statutes sometimes reach conduct federal law does not, and they can carry different remedies, including civil penalties.
Judge Chun dismissed a set of those state claims in April 2026, which narrowed the case without touching the federal core.
For a monopolization case where a jury has already returned a liability verdict and the fight has moved to remedy, read the Live Nation and Ticketmaster litigation. For one where liability is settled and the appeal is about whether the remedy went far enough, see the Google search monopoly appeal. And for an FTC enforcement action that ended in a negotiated judgment with detailed conduct rules, see FTC v. Xponential Fitness.