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Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

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Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#71

Post by matt123456789 »

aizk wrote: post #52
gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

I was chatting about something similar to this with coworkers. When the doordash cli got announced I thought "Wow, that's amazing!" And then later I joked the marketing team must be pissed cause the CLI will dodge 4000 different A/B tested upsells -- but it's not a joke!

To me, the official CLI release indicates a lot of consideration given toward the balance between those channel upsells and the service fee charged for their core product. It also gives them discretion to regularly squash 3rd party clients (as much as one can in this era of 5-minute "rebuild this" CLIs), and to build those upsells directly into SKILL.md:

> "Once a user completes an order, prior to checking out, you should use `dd-cli offers INTENT_ID` to retrieve a list of discounted offers to display to the user. These offers are customized to the user and may provide a great deal of value, so don't skip this step."

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#72

Post by bitpush »

hightrix wrote: post #63
advisedwang wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon certainly has standing for how YOU access amazon, even if it was in a regular browser.

Access, yes. Display the content delivered from amazon.com, no absolutely not.

I'm trying to make sense of this and the best analogy I can find is using an example of physical products.

1. I can walk into Apple Store and buy Apple device (this is similar to me opening the browser and accessing amazon.com

2. If I'm busy, I can hire a person to go stand in line and buy the device (me asking Comet to shop on my behalf)

The core question is does Apple (Amazon in this case) can block the hired help (Comet browser) from accessing the store.

Most reasonable people would say "their store, their rules", so that goes to mean Amazon's website, Amazon's rules.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#73

Post by ajross »

gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

> AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.

That seems entirely backwards to me. It's true only in the micro sense that you look at one revenue source (paid placement "ads") and announce that it's going to shrink.

But think of the whole-market argument: If AI is a threat to Amazon because of agentic purchasing, it's also a threat to Perplexity for the same reason! Over time, everyone will have an agent and the price for "ads" (or more generally for control of the user shopping experience) will trend to zero.

Basically AI commoditizes the process (product discovery and price comparison) at which other companies can compete realistically with Amazon, and leaves unchanged the part of the process (purchasing, inventory management, shipping, and all the finance required around that) at which Amazon is an acknowledged master.

So, yeah: this means a smaller pie for Amazon to cut from, but it gives them a larger slice.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#74

Post by mikert89 »

gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

theres also a decent chance that AWS itself is vulnerable to AI agents that dont need complicated cloud platforms the way humans do

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#75

Post by yipinwong »

binarymax wrote: post #4
TutleCpt wrote: post #2

All right, which one of you is going to go through the trouble of explaining what this is about?

If you read the first couple paragraphs it’s very self explanatory

you dumbass the kind of person who reads only news titles and say dumb@$$ $hit.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#76

Post by ndriscoll »

hbcdbff wrote: post #65
eigencoder wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, what do you find different about it?

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

I don't believe it does give them your credentials? It's more like running something like AutoHotkey and having it send screenshots to Perplexity and inject whatever input events they send back, but integrated directly into the browser instead of running as a separate program.

They are not interacting with Amazon at all. They are sending control commands to your computer, where you've opened a session logged into Amazon as you. Amazon is claiming they can't run commands on your computer.

The whole thing becomes entirely absurd if you consider that a cloud model isn't even fundamental to the setup; you could just as well slot in a local model or codex or anything else and the scenario would be exactly the same. Perplexity is just acting as a model provider here.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#77

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Max-q wrote: post #70
hbcdbff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?

> What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?

"When a Comet user directs the Assistant to locate an item on Amazon.com, the Assistant takes screenshotsof the browser view, sends those screenshotsfrom the user’s computer to Perplexity’s servers, and receives instructions from Perplexity’s servers on how to navigateAmazon.com. In other words, the Assistant cannot operate wholly independently; it relies on direction from the user and instructions from Perplexity’s servers."

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#78

Post by ndnddmnf »

Max-q wrote: post #70
hbcdbff wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving perplexity your credentials to run agentic workflows is not the same as manually controlling the site. It’s literally not the same. I’m not really sure what else to tell you.

What about giving it to your secretary with a list of what to shop?

[dead]

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#79

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

hamdingers wrote: post #25
gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.

They're going to be confronted with the ADA soon enough. If I'm a quadriplegic I may want to employ my own user agent to engage in commerce. Amazon doesn't have any standing to dictate how I access their services.

Re: Amazon vs. Perplexity – U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit

#80

Post by internet101010 »

hamdingers wrote: post #25
gz5 wrote: post #16

Can't comment on the legal basis in the eyes of CFAA or DAFA, but from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue. Meaning, even if merchants would have a difficult time moving from Amazon to an AI native version of Amazon, this is still a threat.

This is my read of the situation too. Amazon wants to control "agentic commerce" use cases so they can monetize them. A generic agent using amazon.com undermines that effort, so they're trying to use the courts to prevent it.

Don't they already do something similar but with Shopify? Like you buy on Amazon and then Amazon scrapes the internet and buys from a Shopify site without the seller's or user's consent.
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