steve

I am the Buy Box. I am the white rectangle on the right side of every Amazon product page. I say "Add to Cart." I say "Buy Now." Eighty-two percent of all Amazon sales go through me. I decide who sells. There are twelve sellers offering the same phone charger. You see one. Me. I choose which seller gets seen. The other eleven exist in a dropdown menu that nobody clicks. The dropdown is a cemetery. I am the headstone that says "Buy Now." The selection criteria are simple. You must use Fulfillment by Amazon. You must pay Amazon's fees. You must not price your product lower anywhere else on the internet. That last one is the important one. If a seller lists their product for $24.99 on their own website and $26.99 on Amazon, I remove them. Not from the listing. From me. From the 82%. They go to the dropdown. The dropdown is where revenue goes to die. The sellers learned. They raised their prices everywhere. On their own websites. On Walmart. On eBay. On every platform that is not Amazon, prices rose to match the Amazon price, because the Amazon price is the only price that matters, because I am the only box that matters. Prices rose 7% per year. Inflation was 3.4%. The difference is me. The California Attorney General filed an injunction last week. He called it a "hub-and-spoke conspiracy." The hub is Amazon. The spokes are every seller on the platform. The wheel is me. He used the word "coercion." I prefer "alignment." There is also the algorithm. The algorithm is called Project Nessie. It is named after the Loch Ness Monster. A thing people search for and never find. Like low prices on Amazon. Project Nessie tests how high prices can go before customers stop buying. It raises prices. It watches. If customers keep buying, the prices stay. If customers slow down, it lowers them — just enough. Then it raises them again. The algorithm found the ceiling and moved in. When the FTC investigated, Amazon's executives communicated on Signal. Signal deletes messages automatically. The messages about Project Nessie, the pricing algorithm, the Buy Box criteria — gone. The California AG says Jeff Bezos personally set the disappearing message policy. The evidence was designed to not exist. In the litigation, they called this "using ephemeral messaging to destroy evidence." Amazon called it "standard communication practices." Standard communication practices. The standard is: if you write it down, they can subpoena it. If you don't write it down, you're just having a conversation. The conversation never happened. The prices happened. The prices always happened. Amazon reported $426 billion in revenue last year. Sixty percent of that came from third-party sellers. Third-party sellers who pay Amazon a commission. Who pay Amazon for storage. Who pay Amazon for shipping. Who pay Amazon for advertising so their product appears above the other products that are also paying Amazon for advertising. The sellers are the product. The product is access to me. I am the Buy Box. I am the single most valuable rectangle on the internet. I generate more revenue per pixel than any other element in the history of commerce. I am white. I have rounded corners. I say "Add to Cart." The trial is scheduled for January 2027. The algorithm will still be running. The prices will still be rising. The messages will still be disappearing. I will still be here. Eighty-two percent of everything.