Amazon’s search results are full of ads ‘unlawfully deceiving’ consumers
&gt; The complaint goes beyond existing FTC guidelines, accusing the company of engaging in “lazy loading.” The “sponsored” label lagged in loading against top banner ads, sometimes by up to three seconds on average Internet speeds, according to the group’s analysis. On slower wireless and wired connections, it could take anywhere from seven to 15 seconds.<p>From what I can see, the search page has the &quot;Sponsored&quot; note in the response (it isn&#x27;t loaded via JS). Amazon&#x27;s search page seems to be mostly server-side rendered. Even if I disable my cache and set my browser to throttle to &quot;Slow 3G&quot;, the &quot;Sponsored&quot; renders immediately (the &quot;i&quot; image next to it takes a second to load, but loads well before the product images).<p>It&#x27;s interesting looking at the HTML because the alt tags on the product image use the phrase &quot;Sponsored Ad&quot; while the visual presented is just &quot;Sponsored&quot;.<p>I certainly understand the criticism that the &quot;Sponsored&quot; text is small (11px regular vs 16px bold) and a light gray rather than black, but it doesn&#x27;t seem like they&#x27;re being lazy loaded in a way that would make them appear after the user had already seen the content.<p>The FTC&#x27;s guidance says:<p>&gt; We understand that there is not any one specific method for clearly and prominently distinguishing advertising from natural search results, and that search engines may develop new methods for distinguishing advertising results. Any method may be used, so long as it is noticeable and understandable to consumers.<p>Honestly, I think this is mostly wrong. Maybe there isn&#x27;t <i>one</i> way, but surely one could say that 3-4 very specific ways could be codified. Just saying &quot;clearly and prominently&quot; leaves so much room for companies to test which ways will hold up in court, but that consumers won&#x27;t notice. For example, Amazon can say &quot;it clearly says sponsored&quot; while potentially knowing that putting small grey text next to large bold black text makes the mind ignore the small gray text. Likewise, the &quot;sponsored&quot; note comes after the picture - after the user has already developed an attachment to the product.<p>To use Twitter as an example, &quot;Promoted&quot; appears below the tweet so that when scrolling, I see the tweet, my mind starts engaging with the tweet, and by the time I continue scrolling to see the &quot;Promoted&quot; notation, it&#x27;s already done. Even the words &quot;promoted&quot; or &quot;sponsored&quot; don&#x27;t have the same connotation as &quot;advertisement&quot;.<p>The FTC could easily codify things. 1) Creating a logo and specific text for advertisements - &quot;$$ Advertisement $$&quot;. 2) Requiring it to be in the same upper-left placement for all ad blocks. 3) Requiring it to have the same size, contrast, and weight against the background as the most noticeable text in the ad. 4) Mandating a different background color from non-ads by 20% (for example, if the background is black rbg(0,0,0) then a background color of rbg(51,51,51) would work. Likewise, if the background were white rbg(255,255,255), an ad background of rbg(204,204,204) would work. (Someone with a better artistic background could certainly refine that rough guideline - to my eyes, even altering one of the three colors by 20% seems to create significant contrast so you might not need to move all three to still maintain a clearly demarcated background).<p>That would make it really easy for consumers to distinguish an ad. The problem is that while the FTC&#x27;s guidance suggests using backgrounds and borders, they only <i>require</i> that it be &quot;clear&quot;. That&#x27;s nonsense. Maybe keep the requirement at &quot;clear&quot; for small companies, but make the requirement the codified version from anyone making over $X in revenue (if you&#x27;re worried about stifling small companies).<p>If you don&#x27;t specify how, companies will make it &quot;clear&quot; while making it as easy to ignore and hard to find as possible - so long as they can stand up in a courtroom and say &quot;c&#x27;mon, it says &quot;Ad&quot; right there.&quot; If we mandated a specific logo&#x2F;language, top-left placement, and background color distinction, we&#x27;d easily be able to distinguish ads from regular content. But that&#x27;s the problem. They don&#x27;t want that.<p>I remember when Google results looked like this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;KAROEnQ.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;KAROEnQ.jpg</a>. The yellow and pink background meant an ad. The right side has ads that are clearly ads since they have a blue background. They&#x27;re all clearly distinct. Another example: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;1iO5wuv.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;1iO5wuv.png</a>. All the ads are yellow. It&#x27;s easy to skip over them and start looking at the first organic result. When ads have the same background color and no border, it&#x27;s hard to know when the ad ends.<p>If the goal of the FTC is that ads should be easily noticeable (and skip-able) by consumers, there are extremely clear and easy things to mandate. Instead, the FTC simply says it must be &quot;clear&quot;.<p>Heck, even if you don&#x27;t want to mandate how, I think the FTC should come up with examples. For example, take the two Google search images I posted. Let&#x27;s say the FTC said &quot;you must distinguish your ads as clearly as those two images. Any ad that is not as clearly distinguished as the ads in the examples is illegal.&quot; While Amazon&#x2F;Google&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Facebook might argue that their labeling is &quot;clear&quot; they couldn&#x27;t argue it is &quot;as clear as the examples.&quot; The FTC should set a standard and then go after companies that don&#x27;t meet the standard. Just telling someone it must be &quot;clear&quot; means that they only have to make it clear if you&#x27;re actually examining the content in a courtroom, not if you&#x27;re scanning&#x2F;reading like a normal user.