New details revealed in FTC vs. Amazon | Flexport buys Convoy’s tech

Hello, GeekWire readers. Flexport is buying Convoy’s tech; Seattle grocer PCC blamed office worker foot traffic in its decision to close a downtown store; and we break down new details revealed in the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon. 

Jeff Bezos, Project Nessie, and an ‘oh crap’ moment: Those are some of the plot twists in an updated version of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust complaint against Amazon, filed Thursday morning in the U.S. District Court in Seattle. The new version makes public many (but not all) of the details that were previously redacted from the government’s allegations — which Amazon continues to vehemently dispute. 

• The suit alleges that Bezos, Amazon’s CEO at the time, instructed execs to accept more junk ads on product pages because, as the FTC puts it, Amazon “can extract billions of dollars through increased advertising despite worsening its services for customers.”

• That “oh crap” moment came when an Amazon executive realized that the company’s move to stop penalizing products sold on multiple platforms was “fundamentally weakening [Amazon’s] competitive advantage in the U.S.,” the FTC claims. Read more.

Citing a decline in downtown office workers, Seattle grocery chain PCC is closing a flagship store located at the base of the Rainier Square skyscraper. The building was originally going to feature 30 floors of Amazon office space, before the tech giant pulled out. PCC said the store “significantly underperformed.” Read more. 

• Related: Seattle office space demand is lowest among U.S. cities measured in new report

Convoy finds a buyer: Freight company Flexport said it acquired technology and a small team from the Seattle trucking marketplace startup that abruptly shut down last month. Flexport, which has an engineering center in the Seattle area, is another logistics startup that raised huge amounts of venture capital but is now struggling amid the shaky freight market. Read more. 

Zillow Group beat revenue estimates for its third quarter earnings but shares were down Thursday morning. The company focused much of its letter to shareholders on a verdict reached this week in a class-action lawsuit that may have wide-ranging implications for the real estate industry. 

• The lawsuit could change the way buyer agents generate commissions on home sales. Zillow CEO Rich Barton said “we strongly believe Zillow is well positioned to thrive regardless of how it all plays out.”

• Redfin, another Seattle-based online real estate giant, reports its earnings later today. Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman offered his take on the implications of the commissions lawsuit in a new blog post. 

State of the video game industry: Bungie’s layoffs this week were the latest in a series of cuts made by various video game developers in 2023, which has also been a huge year for new releases. Read more. 

Hot Links:

• Former Microsoft exec Steven Sinofsky says President Biden’s new executive order regulating AI is a “premature and pessimistic political solution to unknown technical problems.” (Hardcore Software) 
• Microsoft is getting scrutiny over its use of AI to curate news stories that appear on MSN and Microsoft Start. (CNN)