The Customer Who Doesn't Look

Meta's launch pictures for Muse, its personal AI agent, show it comparing pushchairs and asking permission before it orders one. geekwire-muse-block From the night of Sunday 20 September, anyone who sent it to Amazon to do that got a pop-up instead. Continued access by an AI agent Amazon has not authorised, it said, breaks the Conditions of Use, "to which our customers have agreed". adweek-amazon-muse Jonathan Wegener posted a screenshot of it on X the next morning. Muse was twelve days old. meta-muse-intro

As a product designer I read a pop-up as a decision about who is being spoken to. Amazon's first leadership principle says leaders pay attention to competitors but "obsess over customers". amazon-leadership-principles This one is a message about a competitor, delivered to a customer. The usual explanation is advertising. An agent does not see sponsored listings, and Amazon sold about $76bn of advertising in the four quarters to June. amazon-ad-quarterly The analyst Benedict Evans added an older one this week: the trade of "customer ownership in exchange for distribution".

Both explanations are right, and both describe the fight from the companies' side. From the customer's side something simpler has happened. Looking was how she paid. She paid in money too. But every sponsored result she scrolled past was a second charge, on her attention, which the shop collected and never itemised. An agent stops that payment. The last time software did this at scale, companies settled the bill between themselves, behind a default, and nobody showed her the price. The Muse block is the opening of the same settlement.

Looking Was How She Paid

Every results page on Amazon serves two buyers: the person after a pushchair, and the brand paying to be seen by her. Anyone who has laid out a results page knows the arithmetic. A sponsored slot near the top pushes a result she asked for further down. Morgan Stanley's internet analysts say most e-commerce companies now earn a majority of their profit, sometimes all of it, from advertising. morgan-stanley-agentic-commerce

The two buyers have pulled against each other for years. On 2 November 2023 the US Federal Trade Commission released a less redacted version of its complaint against Amazon. It alleges that Jeff Bezos told executives to "accept more defects", the company's own word for adverts irrelevant to a search. bloomberg-ftc-junk-ads Amazon disputes the case, and says its mix of organic and sponsored results helps shoppers find what they want. Whoever wins in court, the design fact is plain enough. Her attention is one of the two things the page sells, and the shop is the party that benefits from her not noticing.

We Have Blocked the Looking Before

The web's own standard has always called the browser a user agent: software that makes requests for a person. rfc9110-user-agent A decade ago people began fitting theirs with an ad blocker, and stopped looking. Adblock Plus alone claimed more than 50 million active users. Publishers sued. The blocker's maker found a business. The Financial Times reported in February 2015 that Google, Microsoft and Amazon were paying Eyeo, the company behind Adblock Plus, to let their adverts through. One media company put the fee at 30 per cent of the revenue recovered. Amazon declined to comment. The setting that let those adverts through was switched on by default. Eyeo said users could turn it off, and that most sites were listed free. pcworld-adblock-whitelist A default is still a design decision. That one decided what people who had chosen not to look would see, and who was paid for it.

The courts have given the same pair of answers twice. Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled on 19 April 2018 that users decide whether to install a blocker. Publishers, it said, have ways to defend themselves, and Bild's website already turned such readers away. lto-bgh-adblock On 4 August this year the Ninth Circuit lifted an injunction against Perplexity's shopping assistant. It called the assistant "a tool, not a person" and held that the user is the one who accesses Amazon. A footnote added that Amazon may still regulate access through its terms. ca9-perplexity That ruling rested on software running on the user's own machine. Muse runs in Meta's cloud, and no court has ruled on that. meta-muse-intro So she may choose her agent, and the shop may refuse it.

Four Conditions, and One of Them Is a Price

Amazon's Conditions of Use have carried agent terms since 2025. An agent must name itself in every request, and must stay away if Amazon has asked it to. conductatlas-amazon-agent-terms The company told Adweek what else it expects: transparency, a way to opt out, a mutual value exchange and a better experience for the customer. adweek-amazon-muse Its own agent, Buy for Me, finds items on other brands' sites, and Amazon points out that it identifies itself and lets brands opt out. geekwire-muse-block I consult for a company that verifies AI agents, so a rule that agents identify themselves is in my commercial interest.

The third condition is the price. Mark Zuckerberg has said Muse will take "a very small cut of whatever the transaction is", possibly paid by the business being bought from. geekwire-muse-fight I wrote about that fee in Who Pays Your Agent?. Put the two statements side by side and each company is asking the other to pay for the customer. One default is already set. Shopify's changelog for 8 September, the day Muse launched, tells merchants their products are "shared with Meta by default". sej-shopify-meta-default In 2015 Amazon paid the blocker's maker. In 2026 it is asking what it gets in return. Neither company says what she is charged, or what she is shown.

What the Driver Was Quoted

I have worked on a product where the watching had a price on the screen. At Aviva I was product manager for Aviva Drive, a telematics app that priced your insurance from how you actually drove instead of your postcode. You drove, you got a score, and the score became a quote. Aviva said in 2014 that the safest drivers saved an average of £101. aviva-drive-101 I have written about what I missed there in The Tusk Is Not the Elephant. This much the product did in the open: the driver being watched got a figure for it.

The Amazon shopper never had that quote, and the Muse user does not have it now. The cost to her today is small, and I would rather say so than inflate it. Martin Peers of The Information used Muse on 21 September to buy a pen and a notebook from small retailers. He found it smooth, and slower than going straight to Amazon. geekwire-muse-fight Meta says Muse keeps a complete audit trail, and does not share her conversations or data with its ad systems. meta-muse-intro Amazon says its objection is an undeclared third party inside customer accounts. geekwire-muse-block What neither has put in front of her is the figure: what her not looking is worth, and who is collecting it.

Two Tow Trucks

Your car has died on the hard shoulder and two recovery trucks have turned up. One was sent by your insurer and one by the garage you rang yourself. The drivers are standing between the trucks, arguing about whose job this is. Lorries pass close enough that the wind off them pushes you a step sideways each time. You are holding the keys.

Each driver, when he turns to you, says he is trying to get you home. Neither mentions what the other would have charged, or what he will. You called for help so that you would not have to stand here, and here is where you are standing.

Somebody Has to Pay for the Shop

Advertising is what keeps the shelf cheap. If most of an online retailer's profit comes from adverts, a shopper who stops looking is carried by the ones who still do. Enough of them will push the cost into prices or delivery fees. Amazon built the selection, the delivery and the returns, and it answers for the order when something goes wrong. It made the comparison itself: delivery apps take orders with the restaurant's agreement, and travel agencies book with the airline's. adweek-amazon-muse Nike pulled its own goods off Amazon in 2019 to keep its customer data, and nobody called that hostile to shoppers. thedrum-nike-amazon Both courts said a site may refuse. Muse, meanwhile, is a commercial product whose maker intends to take a cut. Blocking it is a shop declining to fund a rival out of its own margin.

I accept nearly all of that. The shop has to be paid for, Amazon may refuse an agent, and one that will not name itself has given good reason. The objection proves less than it seems, because it settles who should be paid and leaves the customer's side of the bill blank. PCWorld, reporting the Financial Times investigation on 3 February 2015, described how that went last time. The fee ran between companies, and the paid adverts came through by default. pcworld-adblock-whitelist GeekWire reported on 22 September 2026 that Amazon has now pleaded, in the Perplexity case, that an agent maker caused customers to breach their agreement. geekwire-muse-fight Her agreement is in the argument and her price is absent. Two things I cannot show. One is that Amazon has penalised any customer for using Muse. The other is that a toll between Amazon and Meta is where this ends. That rests on one precedent, and a blocker only hid adverts from someone still reading the page.

The Pushchair

Looking was how the customer paid for the shop, and an agent stops the payment without settling who pays instead. Last time the answer was a fee between companies behind a default, so an agent's audit trail needs a line saying who paid. Amazon has told someone comparing pushchairs this month what she agreed to, and neither company has told her what her attention is worth.