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federal trade commission
Cloudflare Outage Ruin Your Morning? Consumer Groups Say Blame Profit-Hungry Big Tech Monopolists
"Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete," said one advocate.
Nov 18, 2025
Just weeks after major Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure outages, Cloudflare on Tuesday became the latest company to "break the internet," prompting consumer watchdogs to take aim at Big Tech and call out industry consolidation.
"This outage is another brutal reminder that the internet is far too dependent on a tiny handful of tech giants," said Public Citizen's Big Tech accountability advocate, J.B. Branch, in a statement. "For years, industry lobbyists have insisted that deregulation would spark innovation from smaller companies. Instead, we got the opposite: mass consolidation of data, compute, and infrastructure into the hands of a few dominant firms whose failures now cascade across the globe."
"Governments and companies continuing to contract with the same handful of companies are increasing the fragility of both the internet and entire economies," Branch continued. "Congress and regulators must finally step in and crack down on anticompetitive behavior, opening markets, requiring interoperability, and ensuring smaller tech firms can compete so the entire digital economy isn't held hostage by the failures of a few dominant companies."
After Amazon's outage last month, Public Citizen and other groups—including the American Economic Liberties Project, Demand Progress Education Fund, and Tech Oversight Project—called on Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson "to swiftly conduct a market structure review of leading cloud services providers, including but not limited to Amazon, to assess how their market dominance and use of monopoly power to stifle competition is creating systemic fragility across industries."
"Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
"This probe should also examine dependencies of key sectors (such as financial services, telecommunications, and government services) on any single cloud provider and the extent to which those dependencies pose systemic risks to data security and privacy and consumer protection, as well as to our open markets and the resilience of our national and global infrastructure systems," the coalition argued. "We urge you to then take robust agency action to counter these systemic dangers, particularly to bring diversification to the cloud industry."
"Given the enormous stakes, the FTC should not defer action until the next crisis—the FTC has the mandate, the requisite knowledge, and the legal authorities to tackle this challenge now," the coalition concluded. "Big Tech is clearly creating systemic dangers that warrant proactive oversight and aggressive intervention by the FTC, on behalf of the American people and as soon as possible."
Just a few weeks later, the Cloudflare outage on Tuesday impacted websites including ChatGPT, Coinbase, Dropbox, X, Shopify, Spotify, Zoom, the Moody credit ratings service, and many more. According to Cloudflare, the San Francisco-based company offers over 60 cloud services globally, and it protects "20% of all websites."
In a statement to Forbes, a company spokesperson said that "the root cause of the outage was a configuration file that is automatically generated to manage threat traffic. The file grew beyond an expected size of entries and triggered a crash in the software system that handles traffic for a number of Cloudflare’s services."
Stressing that there is "no evidence that this was the result of an attack or caused by malicious activity," the spokesperson added that "we expect that some Cloudflare services will be briefly degraded as traffic naturally spikes post incident but we expect all services to return to normal in the next few hours."
Cloudflare also said on X—which is now working again—that "we always strive to be as transparent as possible in these types of situations, and we will be publishing an in-depth blog shortly."
Meanwhile, Demand Progress Education Fund highlighted the coalition's recent letter to the FTC, and Emily Peterson-Cassin, the group's policy director, said that "yet again, a failure at one company disrupted the lives of people all around the globe."
"Big Tech's relentless drive to become the only fish in the pond and centralize the internet in their hands threatens our economy and our national security," she added. "The FTC has the knowledge and the power to help prevent this from happening again. For all our sakes, the agency must take action immediately."
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Trump FTC Deletes Lina Khan-Era Blog Posts Warning of Threat AI Poses to Consumers
The FTC quietly removed from its website an article titled "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm" as the Trump administration looks to undercut efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
Oct 20, 2025
The Trump administration's sweeping purge of government content that conflicts with its far-right ideological and policy project has extended to Federal Trade Commission blog posts warning about the threat that burgeoning artificial intelligence technology poses to US consumers.
Wired reported Monday that the Trump administration has, without explanation, deleted AI-related articles published by the FTC during antitrust trailblazer Lina Khan's tenure as chair of the agency. The headlines of two of the removed posts were "Consumers Are Voicing Concerns About AI" and "AI and the Risk of Consumer Harm."
The latter article, which can still be read here, states that the FTC "is increasingly taking note of AI's potential for real-world instances of harm—from incentivizing commercial surveillance to enabling fraud and impersonation to perpetuating illegal discrimination."
"As firms think about their own approach to developing, deploying, and maintaining AI-based systems, they should be considering the risks to consumers that each of them carry in the here and now, and take steps to proactively protect the public before their tools become a future FTC case study," reads the post, which was authored by staff at the FTC's Office of Technology and Division of Advertising Practices.
The page on the FTC website that previously hosted the article now displays an error message.
Wired noted that the Trump FTC's deletion of the Khan-era blog post is part of a broader scrubbing of government content critical of tech giants and artificial intelligence. In March, the outlet reported that Trump's FTC—currently led by Andrew Ferguson—"removed four years' worth of business guidance blogs as of Tuesday morning, including important consumer protection information related to artificial intelligence and the agency's landmark privacy lawsuits under former chair Lina Khan against companies like Amazon and Microsoft."
The mass removal of Khan-era posts marks a sharp—and potentially illegal—break from the previous administration's handling of government-hosted content that conflicted with its views.
"During the Biden administration, FTC leadership placed 'warning' labels on business directives and other guidance published during previous administrations that it disagreed with," Wired reported. One unnamed FTC source told the outlet that the Trump administration's removal of the Khan-era posts "raises serious compliance concerns under the Federal Records Act and the Open Government Data Act."
The Trump administration's deletion of government content critical of AI comes months after it released an "AI Action Plan" that watchdogs pilloried as a gift to large tech corporations and an attempt to hamstring future efforts to regulate artificial intelligence.
The plan calls for a review of all AI-related FTC investigations launched during Khan's tenure "to ensure that they do not advance theories of liability that unduly burden AI innovation."
Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, said in July that the Trump White House's AI plan was "written by Big Tech."
"A serious AI plan would recognize that the regulation to which this administration is so hostile facilitates innovation—it can help us ensure that we have AI for social good, rather than just corporate profit," said Weissman.
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'Drop in the Bucket': Lina Khan Rips Trump FTC for Giving Amazon a Wrist-Slap Settlement
The Federal Trade Commission's decision to settle with Amazon would be "a big relief for the executives who knowingly harmed their customers," added Khan.
Sep 25, 2025
The Federal Trade Commission announced on Thursday it had reached a settlement with Amazon over allegations that the online retailer had tricked consumers into subscribing to its Prime service—but the woman who led the FTC under former President Joe Biden was not impressed.
According to the FTC, Amazon has agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle claims that it deceived customers into subscribing to Prime and then deliberately made it difficult for them to cancel. In all, Amazon will pay a $1 billion civil penalty, as well as $1.5 billion in refunds to consumers who unwittingly subscribed to Prime.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed the settlement as a victory for the Trump administration and touted the deal as "a record-breaking, monumental win for the millions of Americans who are tired of deceptive subscriptions that feel impossible to cancel." Ferguson also said the settlement would ensure "Amazon never does this again."
Amazon, for its part, said in a statement that it didn't break any laws despite agreeing to pay out billions.
"Amazon and our executives have always followed the law and this settlement allows us to move forward and focus on innovating for customers," the company said. "We work incredibly hard to make it clear and simple for customers to both sign up or cancel their Prime membership, and to offer substantial value for our many millions of loyal Prime members around the world."
However, former FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan accused the agency of letting Amazon off easy, while describing the $2.5 billion settlement as a "drop in the bucket" for the tech giant.
"In 2023, we sued Amazon and several top executives for tricking people into Prime subscriptions and then making it absurdly difficult to cancel," she explained in a post on X. "This week marked the start of a historic jury trial, where American citizens would hear details of Amazon’s business practices and determine if it had broken the law. A couple of days into trial, FTC announces it has settled all charges, rescuing Amazon from likely being found liable for having violated the law and allowing it to pay its way out."
Khan added that the settlement was "no doubt, a big relief for the executives who knowingly harmed their customers."
Amazon currently has a market cap of over $2.3 trillion, meaning the $2.5 billion settlement represents a little more than one-tenth of 1% of its total worth. Its billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is among the richest people on Earth, with an estimated net worth of nearly $240 billion.
Matthew Stoller, an antitrust advocate and researcher at the American Economic Liberties Project, faulted the FTC for letting Amazon settle without any admission of wrongdoing.
"A judge already ruled in summary judgment they violated the law," Stoller observed.
Amazon may not be completely out of the woods legally, however.
As NPR noted on Thursday, Amazon "still faces another, bigger federal lawsuit, in which the FTC has accused the company of functioning as a monopoly." That trial is currently projected to begin in early 2027, NPR added.
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