Australia sues Amazon for making allegedly unfair contracts with subscribers

Australia sues Amazon for making allegedly unfair contracts with subscribersImage source, ReutersImage caption, Amazon's Prime Video streaming service is under government scrutinyByKali HaysTechnology reporterPublished30 June 2026, 19:59 BSTUpdated 4 minutes agoAustralia's consumer watchdog has sued Amazon, claiming the tech giant introduced adverts in Prime Video using allegedly unfair contract terms.The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) said Amazon had broken consumer protection law by making the unfair contracts with over a million annual subscribers between November 2023 and August 2025."Consumers who wanted to avoid ads were left with no choice but to pay more to maintain the service they'd initially signed up for", ACCC chair Gina Cass-Gottlieb said.Amazon has been approached for comment.For more than a decade, Prime Video was a commercial-free streaming offering that was included as part of Amazon's popular Prime subscription, which is sold as an upgrade on its core delivery service.Prime became available in Australia in 2018. It started to roll out advertising in the service globally in early 2024.When Amazon began that year to include ads within Prime Video, it told subscribers in Australia they would need to pay an additional fee each month in order to keep the service free of ads, driving the monthly price up to 12.99 Australian dollars.At that point, the ACCC said over 850,000 people in Australia had already paid for a year's worth of Prime service."Those subscribers were provided with a degraded, ad-supported Prime Video service for the balance of their prepaid term unless they paid for the ad-free option", the ACCC added in a filing, external.The ACCC said Amazon did this by relying on five unfair terms in contracts with over a million customers signed between 1 November 2023 and 18 August 2025."Those contracts included five terms permitting [Amazon Australia] to unilaterally make ma...