Ninth Circuit: shoppers, not agents, access Amazon in Perplexity fight

The Amazon-Perplexity dispute began as a trespass argument: Amazon said the agent entered its store disguised as an ordinary Chrome browser. The Ninth Circuit's August decision reframed it around the user's act, and its September refusal to rehear leaves the underlying case to continue.

That fight is placed alongside other examples where the terms of an exchange are set by a system only one side can see. It cites a December 2025 Consumer Reports and Groundwork Collaborative test in which 437 volunteers bought the same groceries through Instacart, and a dozen eggs at one Washington, D.C. Safeway came up at $3.99, $4.28, $4.59 or $4.79 depending on the shopper. It also cites the Justice Department's RealPage suit and the November 2025 proposed settlement barring the vendor from feeding its models competitors' current nonpublic data, as an instance of a price acquiring an author.

Where elected bodies have acted, the piece points to modest disclosure measures — New York's algorithmic price label, upheld when a federal judge dismissed the National Retail Federation's First Amendment challenge in October 2025, and the EU's Platform Work Directive. It argues a fuller debate could draw on Walter Eucken's view that competition must be instituted and maintained, implying consumers should be able to bring the agent of their choice to any store they may lawfully enter and take its learned data with them.