Writer Cory Doctorow, who coined the term “enshittification” for the way digital platforms slowly decay into something that serves everyone except the user, points to Amazon’s own accounts as the clearest example yet.

Amazon runs several huge businesses, but its single most profitable one isn’t selling goods or renting cloud servers. It’s search placement. When you search Amazon, the top results aren’t its best guess at what you want – they’re sold to whichever seller pays the most. Doctorow calls this “payola”, after the 1950s scandal in which record labels bribed radio DJs to play their songs. The best match for your search is usually buried around the 17th spot, on the second screen; the item at the top is typically about 29% more expensive.

Sellers cover the cost of these bribes by raising prices. And because Amazon forces sellers to match their lowest price everywhere else (a rule now enforced by AI scanning rival websites) those higher prices spread to every other shop too. Amazon’s various fees swallow an estimated 51-60% of a product’s price. This year, the search-placement business alone is on track to top $80 billion – more, Doctorow notes, than the total ad revenue of every newspaper on Earth.

Then it gets worse. Amazon’s placement auctions are meant to work on a well-known fair system: the highest bidder wins but only pays a penny more than the second-highest bid. In August 2026, the US Federal Trade Commission and 22 states sued Amazon, alleging that for seven years it secretly charged winners their full maximum bid instead – about 80% of the time, pulling in some $20 billion. Amazon’s defence is essentially that sellers misunderstood the rules, and that it topped up the price whenever an auction closed below the placement’s “true market value” – an odd claim, since the whole point of an auction is to establish what something is actually worth.

The pattern is the same one that runs through so much of the modern web: a system that quietly makes everything you buy more expensive, squeezes the businesses selling to you, and hides the cheapest option – all while being the most profitable thing the company does.

Source: https://pluralistic.net/