Last week, the Federal Trade Commission sued Amazon, alleging that the online retailer was illegally maintaining a monopoly. Much of the FTC's complaint against Amazon was redacted, but The Wall Street Journal yesterday revealed key details obscured in the complaint regarding a secret algorithm. The FTC alleged that Amazon once used the algorithm to raise prices across the most popular online shopping destinations.

People familiar with the FTC's allegations in the complaint told the Journal that it all started when Amazon developed an algorithm code-named "Project Nessie." It allegedly works by manipulating rivals' weaker pricing algorithms and locking competitors into higher prices. The controversial algorithm was allegedly used for years and helped Amazon to "improve its profits on items across shopping categories" and "led competitors to raise their prices and charge customers more," the WSJ reported.

The FTC's complaint said:

Amazon uses its extensive surveillance network to block price competition by detecting and deterring discounting, artificially inflating prices on and off Amazon, and depriving rivals of the ability to gain scale by offering lower prices.

The FTC complaint redacted this information, but sources told the WSJ that Amazon made "more than $1 billion in revenue" by using Project Nessie, while competitors learned that "price cuts do not result in greater market share or scale, only lower margins," the FTC's complaint said.

"As a result, Amazon has successfully taught its rivals that lower prices are unlikely to result in increased sales—the opposite of what should happen in a well-functioning market," the FTC alleged.

Amazon stopped using the algorithm in 2019—for no clear reason, sources told the WSJ.

FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar told the WSJ that the agency wants more public access to redacted information in the complaint and continues to "call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices.”

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Amazon spokesperson Tim Doyle told Ars that “the FTC’s allegations grossly mischaracterize this tool."

"'Project Nessie' was a project with a simple purpose—to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable," Doyle said. "The project ran for a few years on a subset of products, but didn’t work as intended, so we scrapped it several years ago.”

In a blog responding to the FTC's lawsuit, David Zapolsky—Amazon's senior vice president of global public policy and general counsel—wrote that the FTC fundamentally misunderstands how retail markets work. Zapolsky said that "matching low prices offered by other retailers" has not "somehow" led "to higher prices."

"That’s not how competition works," Zapolsky wrote. "The FTC has it backwards and if they were successful in this lawsuit, the result would be anticompetitive and anti-consumer because we’d have to stop many of the things we do to offer and highlight low prices—a perverse result that would be directly opposed to the goals of antitrust law."

According to the FTC's complaint, "Amazon recognizes the importance of maintaining the perception that it has lower prices than competitors," but that Amazon designed Project Nessie specifically "to deter other online stores from offering lower prices than those of Amazon."

In a press release, the FTC confirmed that it intends to prove that Amazon is "stifling competition on price," among other alleged consumer harms.

"Amazon’s far-reaching schemes impact hundreds of billions of dollars in retail sales every year, touch hundreds of thousands of products sold by businesses big and small, and affect over a hundred million shoppers," the FTC's press release said.

"Seldom in the history of US antitrust law has one case had the potential to do so much good for so many people," John Newman, the deputy director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, said.