Perplexity Comet hurtling toward Amazon ban

Perplexity's AI browser Comet has been banned from accessing Amazon's website after the e-commerce giant obtained a court-ordered preliminary injunction. But the ban won't take effect immediately. The court on Monday issued an administrative stay of its order [PDF] for seven days to allow Perplexity to seek relief from the US …

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the humour

"... they suffer from a degraded shopping experience, their confidence in the Amazon brand is diminished,"

I needed a laugh, thanks Amazon.

[Headley_Grange]

Re: Thanks for the humour

PVJ: "I present you with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space... or suffer from a degraded Amazon shopping experience."

FP+AD: "Where's the airlock?"

[Anonymous Coward]

But who AI grifts the AI grifters?

[elDog]

Won't be long before the court systems use AI instead of human judges

Guess how their judgements will fall?

(Actually, this will properly elevate the programmers to their deserved position.)

[Jason Hindle]

Re: Won't be long before the court systems use AI instead of human judges

Best to hope you don't have one of those guilty-looking faces when that happens!

[Number6]

If the access is from a browser on the user's machine then the only things identifying it as a bot are the behaviour and the user agent string. I trust my access credentials to my browser of choice, so if a user wants to risk theirs with an AI bot then it's at their own risk. I can see Amazon's point if the bot/browser is hammering the site with a lot of accesses that far exceed what a human would do when browsing, but otherwise if it's a Chromium-based browser, what's the effective difference from their end compared to using Chrome, Vivaldi or Brave? I'd say that using Chrome probably leaks way more information than some of the others.

[Doctor Syntax]

I'm not sure what Perplexity provides but if it were to filter out all the products that don't match the search terms it would be vastly improving the user experience.

[Benegesserict Cumbersomberbatch]

"The Court has found Amazon, not Perplexity, is likely to succeed on the merits and that Amazon will face irreparable harmcompromise of its monopoly power over consumers and secondary vendors absent preliminary relief,"

FTFY.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, Envive puts it like this: "AI-powered agents [...] autonomously perform commerce-related tasks: shopping, price comparison, bargaining, and purchasing". The bargaining part in particular is in our favor and much needed to counter the mountain of algorithmic manipulations effected by e-commerce sites (including tavel, lodging, vehicle rental, ...) that are so stacked against our best interests and wallets.

They go on that "The traditional path — awareness, consideration, decision, purchase — gets compressed into seconds. Brands that rely on multi-touch attribution, retargeting campaigns, and conversion optimization suddenly face agents that bypass most of these touchpoints entirely." -- and that's exactly what we need (and want), imho: less price-gouging crookery!

This judge's ruling was complete hogwash here, sold to big money, against we the peoples -- and we shouldn't even need an AI shopping agent to be freed from this tyranny in the first place for doggone's sake!

[Anonymous Coward]

Devils Advocate

scalper bots doing automated shopping vs my grandparents trying to find the buy button

I’m not sure we’re ready to encourage fully automated shopping experiences at this scale - that said, it’s coming… (already here)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Devils Advocate

Yeah, I'm no proponent of AI-shopping but rather an opponent of algorithmic extortion -- with this here situation viewed as a case of 'the enemy of my enemy' ... To me, what Envive lists as advantages (bargaining, bypassing the shakedown) highlights what we're 'unknowingly' up against as individuals, each time we shop online, and basically can't do anything about (being rather expertly fingerprinted by the online surveillance apparatus, before, through, and after purchase, if any), outside of not playing, which isn't always an option.

The court-ordered preliminary injunction is a strike against consumer protections in my view, promoting ever-increasing asymmetry in the shopping experience. A fairer judgment would have posited that if big online retailers can dish all manners of profit-optimizing behavioral influence algorithmics at shoppers, they should all be able to take it too, rather than cry like little children, imho!

[rg287]

The bargaining part in particular is in our favor and much needed to counter the mountain of algorithmic manipulations effected by e-commerce sites (including tavel, lodging, vehicle rental, ...) that are so stacked against our best interests and wallets.

This is not in our interests. How would you verify that your bot is negotiating the best deal from Amazon? Is your bot a better negotiator than a different bot, or did Amazon just strategically make you a better offer this time? This just adds to the complexity of that algorithmic manipulation.

There are two ways forward from this, and they both involve cutting the Gordian knot rather than developing higher planes of knot theory.

1. Don't use online souks. Buy from retail stores or independent online retailers (e.g. ordering groceries from a supermarket, via the supermarket website - not with some third party intermediary involved). This admittedly doesn't help the situation where the vendor is using dynamic pricing like travel/flights, etc. But your average independent retailer's website is generally going to have a price and that's the price. I haven't used Amazon in a year now and feels great. But I'm also an oddball deliberately carrying more cash for small (<£20) transactions and generally being a bit luddite in my petty quest to bilk Visa/Mastercard of their fees.

2. Legislate against dynamic/algorithmic pricing (as we should against targetted ads - contextual ads only). There's a price, that's the price. Done deal. There's a bunch of complexity to it, but there are business practices that harm the consumer, and we should just make illegal the same as cartel activity and monopoly behaviours.

[I ain't Spartacus]

rg287,

I agree with the first part of your post, but I'm not sure I agree about banning dynamic pricing. While there are circumstances where it shouldn't be used, and we might want to legislate for those, there are also times when the consumer just has to accept that if the price is too high, they shouldn't buy.

If you've a commodity that can only take limited customers, say concert tickets or flights on planes, it's not unreasonable to try to get mucho money from people who want to go. And then to lower the prices later, if you've not been able to sell at top dollar. And then, in the case of airlines, to bilk the passenger who absolutely needs to fly somewhere tomorrow. This is basically rationing. The people who want it more, pay more. The people who are willing to go to any gig, or fly at any time, can wait until the last minute and then see what wasn't as much in demand and take that for cheap a few days before.

I used to regularly check Virgin Europe's site, when I lived in Brussels, and decide if I wanted to come back to Blighty for a weekend if there were cheap flights on the Thursday/Friday. Prices would hit the bottom about Monday, the time I had to get to a meeting the next morning I ended up paying £260 to get to London, while the couple in the next seats to me had paid £250 and were going all the way to LA.

However, I wouldn't allow this for trains, or other public transport, in the UK - as we want to reduce car use so shouldn't penalise people for not knowing where they're going in advance.

But I really don't see why anyone has an absolute right to a cheap Oasis ticket. Let Oasis take the reputational damage for pricing their fans out of tickets. That was a choice they made, though they denied it - and even then there are ways round it - to let fans with less money have a fair crack of the whip. Many UK attractions have Universal Credit tickets available for £1 (you have to prove your entitlement), for example. Manchester United used to have a scheme where you could queue up on a Tuesday morning to buy discounted tickets for Old Trafford matches, to guarantee that local supporters could get in, when prices suddenly jumped up to £70. Bet they don't do it now. Most football clubs limit scarce Cup and European ticket sales to people who've got season tickets or have bought a certain number of tickets in the last season, so the "real fans" get first dibs on the limited resource.

If more consumers would just say no, we'd do better. Look at Walker's crisps. They used to cost about 20% more than supermarket own brand. In the last ten years, when inflation has probably averaged 5%, they've gone from £1 for a 6 pack to £2.50 - at time when the supermarkets have gone from 80p to £1.20. That's a 250% rise against a 50% rise. Supermarket ones are of a similar quality nowadays, if we all made that switch, then they'd learn a lesson and take less outrageous profits. But I don't think we should legislate for it. How do you define quality? Are Apple 3 times better than Nothing Phone, or Google Pixel twice as good? I didn't think so, and got the cheaper phone. But the camera really isn't as good, although it's no worse than the cheaper Pixel models.

I'm all for better consumer information. Martin Lewis is bloody brilliant, for example. But I also think we should be responsible for our choices and we should only legislate where market power trumps consumer power. Or where a sports stadium is charging a week's salary for water, but won't let you bring your own.

[rg287]

If you've a commodity that can only take limited customers, say concert tickets or flights on planes, it's not unreasonable to try to get mucho money from people who want to go. And then to lower the prices later, if you've not been able to sell at top dollar. And then, in the case of airlines, to bilk the passenger who absolutely needs to fly somewhere tomorrow. This is basically rationing. The people who want it more, pay more. The people who are willing to go to any gig, or fly at any time, can wait until the last minute and then see what wasn't as much in demand and take that for cheap a few days before.

If you've a commodity that can only take limited customers, say concert tickets or flights on planes, it's not unreasonable to try to get mucho money from people who want to go. And then to lower the prices later, if you've not been able to sell at top dollar. And then, in the case of airlines, to bilk the passenger who absolutely needs to fly somewhere tomorrow. This is basically rationing. The people who want it more, pay more. The people who are willing to go to any gig, or fly at any time, can wait until the last minute and then see what wasn't as much in demand and take that for cheap a few days before.

Or.... and hear me out here... you can work out what your cost of product/service is, decide what your margin should be, and then sell your products/tickets/services at that price. Why shouldn't everyone pay the same to get on the same flight or into the same gig? These companies know what their price points are. They know that an Oasis gig will command higher prices than some little band on their debut tour. When the flight is full, it's full. There's no operational reason to ramp the prices so the last 3 seats cost 4x more than the first 3. Or so that they cost more on a Saturday evening when people are watching TV and see an advert and pull out their laptop to book a holiday.

Of course even in the analogue era, there was a level of demand pricing - a hotel would have it's rate card (probably with high/low season pricing), and then they'd have the tariff board behind the counter for anyone who walked in and asked for a room that night. But again, at least it's transparent, rather than looking the person up and down and making up a number on the spot.

However, I wouldn't allow this for trains, or other public transport, in the UK - as we want to reduce car use so shouldn't penalise people for not knowing where they're going in advance.

It's unfortunate that we absolutely do this as a form of demand management, and yeah, it should be banned (and unnecessary). The problem with trains vs planes of course is planes have a booked seat - trains can (in principle) run to standing-room-only. They don't run out of tickets as such (at least not the way we run them) - so pricing encourages people onto quieter services. BUT this is a product of us not investing in our railways for 40 years and running them very inefficiently and at low density. A great shame HS2 was scaled back as this would quadruple the number of local services we can operate once the ICE trains are segregated onto their own line.

I would note that this could be applied to plane tickets as well. I know someone whose mother (in Spain) was taken gravely ill and just had to bite the bullet and get the next flight out, hang the cost. They were in a privileged position that they could, but others aren't. Particularly in the UK, with the issue that Eurostar is not very well run, doesn't run as many services as it should, and charges the hell out of the ones it does. Insane that it's generally more expensive than the equivalent flight (although not by as much as we might think including airport transfers/parking/etc). Aviation is not always a luxury/holiday commodity the way concert tickets are. Of course we need to get continental rail services sorted, but aviation is actually a form of public transport - albeit one that needs to be deprioritised versus rail.

Universal Credit tickets available for £1 -- Manchester United used to have a scheme where you could queue up on a Tuesday morning to buy discounted tickets for Old Trafford matches, to guarantee that local supporters could get in, when prices suddenly jumped up to £70. Bet they don't do it now. Most football clubs limit scarce Cup and European ticket sales to people who've got season tickets or have bought a certain number of tickets in the last season, so the "real fans" get first dibs on the limited resource.

These are just discounts though. They're not the sort of airline dynamic pricing where they bump prices based on whether you've looked those particular flights or destinations before. Moreover, they're transparently declared ahead of time. If you're on UC, you get cheap entry. If you want scarce tickets that badly, join the supporters club. This isn't a perfect system of course because you're discriminating against low-income fans who perhaps can't afford to attend many matches, but would get up at 3am to queue for tickets (when other - better heeled - fans wouldn't, but they can just buy membership or a bunch of minor match tickets to qualify for the scarce matches).

Look at Walker's crisps. -- But I don't think we should legislate for it. How do you define quality?

We've drifted well away from demand pricing here. This is just cost of living, along with supermarket's "consent or pay" shenanigans. Upfront pricing like that is for the markets to decide. If Apple or Walkers are too expensive then people won't buy them. Vertu phones are insane money for what they are, but a handful of more-money-than-sense people buy them. That's fine. What should be legislated against is the idea that Apple charge more because your tracking cookies/advertising ID shows that you've looked at certain other brands and they've inferred they can bilk you for more. Apple are actually fine. That's an example of that I want - they set a price, and that's what you pay and I don't have to waste my life trawling through camelcamel working out that if I logon at 8.33am on the second Monday of the month using Safari 26.1 I can get a discount for <reasons>.

Sure, Apple drop the price on old models, and have their refurb programme, but their prices don't wander up and down algorithmically the way airline prices do.

Of course, if we banned RTB advertising and moved back to contextual ads, then most of the tracking and datasets used to drive dynamic pricing simply wouldn't exist, which is possibly a neater "two-birds-with-one-stone" way to wind ourselves back to some sort of vaguely transparent pricing policies. So there's that.

[martinusher]

It looks like dynamic pricing hasn't yet permeated to UK grocery stores. We're not quite sure how to do it with in-person shopping but on line services like Instacart in the US have been dividing customers into three broad demographic classes and charging different prices for each group. (In Instacart's defense its not them that seems to be differentiating between customers but the pricing research and management organizations used by the grocery chains.)

Telltale signs that your prices are being manipulated are the change from printed price labels on the shelves to intelligent labels with e-ink displays.These could in theory update as you approach them.

(....and you thought it was all about airline tickets and concert prices........)

[T. F. M. Reader]

Legislate against dynamic/algorithmic pricing

You don't want to make financial markets (even online ones), auctions (even eBay), or off-line souks or bazaars illegal, I hope.

[Not Yb]

This is one of those cases where I think whoever wins, we all wind up losing.

If Amazon wins, there won't be any AI allowed there except those that Amazon has agreements with. Or Amazon's own AI, designed to encourage purchase of whatever Amazon wants to sell more of this week.

If Perplexity wins, shopping websites could wind up working like Ticketmaster and it's 'anti-scalping-bot proofing' that doesn't actually stop bots or scalpers.

[Will Godfrey]

Pot - Kettle

Photon-ically Challenged

[Bebu sa Ware]

I must have missed something

easy to do I suppose in this flood of shit but I don't quite see the obvious distinction between a browser with password manager auto filling the Amazon login and this botty thingy.

I am guessing that the bot is grabbing hundreds or thousands of pages of listings in an impossibly small time. Presumably throttling the traffic would be the easy fix.

At this point anything that totally screws these mega online souks ought to be encouraged. I suspect the at least equally shitty Chinese sites won't be so precious.

Dark patterns slain by even darker patterns.

[I ain't Spartacus]

This is already not allowed

"Today, Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf,"

Perplexity not realising that this is already against Amazon's Ts&Cs. At least if you let your PA use your Amazon account to buy stuff for you, and also give them access to your credit card - which is also against the Credit Card's Ts&Cs. You can make this above board, by them having their own card on your account, and using Amazon Business, with multiple users though. But lots don't.

But I've been in the first position for work, where you're effectively posing as someone else, which can get difficult and has a couple of times left me making a call claiming to be someone else and giving all their personal data to get stuff done. That's both awkward and is a risky breach of security that exists for good reasons. I also now sometimes have to do stuff on Mum's behalf, which can be awkward as it's much easier to impersonate someone the same sex as you. But then you I do that with her, so can hand the phone over to get her to identify herself then take over for the technical bits of the call.

But in Perplexity's argument, if you let your PA buy stuff on Amazon on your card, and they steal your money - you get no comeback from either Amazon or the card company. That's entirely at your own risk, and you'd have to get the police involved or sue them to get redress. Plus Amazon and your card company would have every right to close your account.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: This is already not allowed

It's Amazon FUD whataboutery imho.

[heyrick]

F*ck Perplexity

This is the salient point here: Amazon's rules prohibiting automated data gathering

This is bullshit: Today, Amazon announced it does not believe in your right to hire labor, to have an assistant or an employee acting on your behalf

I'm surprised that this hasn't already been ruled on, as Amazon isn't preventing one from employing a lackey to wade through the site for you. They just don't want an automatic device that will blitz the site. The only reason Perplexity doesn't understand this is because it's in their interest to fail to understand it.

But f*ck Perplexity right between the eyeballs because they have been hitting my largely uninteresting site. As soon as I blocked the User-Agent, they came back with exactly the same behaviour but a faked UA that looks like a regular user. It's arseholes like this that are causing websites to be less and less open. Scum...

[jake]

::shrugs::

A plague o' both their houses.

No redeeming features in the entire industry, IMO. Hopefully they all sue each other into oblivion.