Tech Crunch: “Attorneys general from 17 states joined the FTC in the lawsuit, alleging that Amazon leverages a “set of interlocking anticompetitive and unfair strategies” to maintain a monopoly. The states that signed onto the FTC’s action are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, New York, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin.”

Tech Crunch: What is Amazon’s [redacted] ‘Project Nessie’ algorithm? “The FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon alleging anti-competitive practices is largely full of things we already knew in a general sense: price hikes, pressure to use Amazon fulfillment and so on. But then we get to a sea of redactions and the mysterious “Project Nessie.” What is it, and could it possibly be as alarming as the unredacted sections make it sound? The project, product or process is referred to more than a dozen times in the complaint filed by the FTC. And it’s one of those situations where the redactions probably make it sound scarier than it actually is. Probably. The first reference comes on page 6: Amazon has also [redacted] through a [redacted] operation called “Project Nessie.” [redacted] Amazon’s Project Nessie has already extracted over [redacted] from American households. What is it extracting? Money? Data? Something quantifiable, or else the document would not say “over.” Though I wouldn’t put it past Amazon, the context does not suggest anything physical or private, like video or biometrics. An Amazon blog post from 2018 spotted by GeekWire describes Nessie as “a system used to monitor spikes or trends on Amazon.com.” Much of the timeline in the lawsuit takes place since then, however, so this definition (such as it is) may no longer be accurate, if it ever was…”