The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has launched legal action against Amazon, accusing the global e-commerce and technology giant of violating national consumer protection laws through unfair contract terms tied to the rollout of ads on its Prime Video streaming service. The case centers on changes Amazon made to its Prime offering starting in early 2024, when the company introduced mandatory advertising to the previously ad-free Prime Video platform that has long been included as a core perk of annual Prime subscriptions.
For more than ten years, Prime Video positioned itself as a commercial-free streaming bonus for Amazon Prime members, who pay an annual fee for faster delivery and a bundle of additional digital benefits. Prime launched in Australia in 2018, and when Amazon began rolling out advertising across its global Prime Video footprint, Australian subscribers were told they would have to pay an extra monthly fee to retain the ad-free experience they had originally agreed to. That surcharge pushed the total effective monthly cost of Prime to 12.99 Australian dollars.
According to the ACCC’s filing, more than 850,000 Australian customers had already prepaid for full-year Prime subscriptions when Amazon rolled out the change. These prepaid subscribers were forced to accept a lower-quality, ad-interrupted streaming service for the remainder of their subscription terms unless they paid the additional cost for ad-free access. The regulator alleges that Amazon enforced these changes using five unfair contract clauses that applied to more than 1 million Australian subscribers between November 2023 and August 2025. These clauses allowed Amazon to unilaterally make material changes that negatively impact the service, while offering no contractual right for subscribers to claim a refund or other fair compensation for the degraded service.
“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 in a statement outlining the regulator’s legal position. Amazon has not yet issued a public response to the lawsuit, as media outlets have been unable to secure comment from the company.
This is not the first time Amazon’s consumer practices have drawn regulatory scrutiny across the globe. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has previously taken legal action against Amazon over allegations it signed users up for Prime subscriptions without their explicit consent and deliberately made the cancellation process overly complicated. Just this week, Amazon agreed to pay an FTC fine to settle separate claims that it failed to protect consumers from online shopping fraud, creating what regulators described as a “Kafkaesque ordeal” for defrauded customers seeking resolution. In the United Kingdom, regulators have previously opened investigations into Amazon’s third-party product listing practices and the widespread spread of fraudulent customer reviews on the platform.