Australia'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 broke 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. A spokeswoman for Amazon told the BBC the company is "reviewing the case filed by the ACCC in detail" and has cooperated throughout the investigation.

For more than a decade, Prime Video was a commercial-free streaming offering included as part of Amazon's popular Prime subscription, sold as an upgrade on its core delivery service. Prime became available in Australia in 2018, and started rolling out advertising globally in early 2024. When Amazon began including ads, it told Australian subscribers they would need to pay an additional fee each month to keep the service ad-free, 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. The ACCC said Amazon relied on five unfair terms in contracts with over a million customers signed between 1 November 2023 and 18 August 2025, permitting Amazon to unilaterally make materially adverse changes without any contractual entitlement for subscribers to receive refunds or other meaningful redress.

Amazon's treatment of its users has come under government scrutiny before. In the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has taken legal action against Amazon on claims the company would sign people up for Prime without their consent and then make it difficult to cancel. Amazon also recently agreed to pay an FTC fine to resolve claims that it created a "Kafkaesque ordeal" for victims of online shopping fraud. In the UK, the government has previously investigated Amazon's method of listing goods and fake reviews.