Amazon.com Inc. recently and quietly dropped the arbitration requirement in their terms of service. The change was made after more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands were made on Amazon. The individual demands were made on behalf of Amazon’s Echo users. Because of the individual arbitration demands, the costs for the filing fees were in the tens of millions of dollars. These fees, under Amazon’s own policies, were payable by Amazon.
The change to the terms of service now allows customers to file lawsuits, including potential class actions. However, users will need to agree to adjudicate in the state or federal courts in King County, Washington.
Amazon is currently involved in several class actions, including one on its Echo devices.
This blog is intended to provide information to the general public and to practitioners about developments that may impact Oregon class actions.
A class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of older workers who seek to sue a defendant class of all employers and employment agencies who use Facebooks’ ad placement tools to direct ads to younger workers to the exclusion of older workers. The Communication Workers Union and other plaintiffs allege that employers that do this are engaging in disparate treatment. 
A subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. has been named in a class action lawsuit accusing the company of encouraging third-party vendors to raise the prices of their products by the amount they would have charged for shipping and deceiving customers into believing they were receiving free shipping.