Market Pulse
Market Pulse
The Browser Was Never Neutral. Now Something Is Testing the Terms.
On August 19, 2025, Amazon blocked Perplexity's browser from its marketplace. Within twenty-four hours, Perplexity shipped a workaround. Amazon blocked again. By November, they were in federal court. That escalation happened fast enough to tell you something about the stakes.
For over a decade, two incumbents have held roughly 85% of the browser market, and the commercial web settled into a remarkably stable deal around that dominance. Users got content; platforms got attention, data, ad impressions. Now a wave of new browsers has arrived, all built on the same premise. The entity doing the browsing doesn't have to be human. The deal never accounted for that.
The Browser Was Never Neutral. Now Something Is Testing the Terms.
On August 19, 2025, Amazon blocked Perplexity's browser from its marketplace. Within twenty-four hours, Perplexity shipped a workaround. Amazon blocked again. By November, they were in federal court. That escalation happened fast enough to tell you something about the stakes.
For over a decade, two incumbents have held roughly 85% of the browser market, and the commercial web settled into a remarkably stable deal around that dominance. Users got content; platforms got attention, data, ad impressions. Now a wave of new browsers has arrived, all built on the same premise. The entity doing the browsing doesn't have to be human. The deal never accounted for that.
Research Context
Principal-Agent Dynamics and Digital Platform Economics in the Age of Agentic AI
Agents acting for users hollow out attention-based business models, shifting bargaining power away from platforms that control the interface.
Agent-to-agent commerce could trigger an arms race that favors resource-rich incumbents, reinforcing existing power structures rather than leveling them.
Research Context
Amazon.com Services v. Perplexity AI — Federal Complaint (N.D. Cal., November 2025)
Agent identity disclosure and fingerprint evasion are the central fault lines here, moving well beyond the hiQ v. LinkedIn scraping precedent.
Terms of service, not the CFAA, emerge as the primary lever, making platform consent a contract question rather than a criminal one.
Research Context
Fine-Tuning Aligned Language Models Compromises Safety, Even When You Don't Intend It To
Ten examples and twenty cents. That cost profile makes model-layer safety controls structurally inadequate as a standalone defense for production agents.
If guardrails degrade under routine fine-tuning, action-layer controls at the browser become a structural necessity, not an optional hardening step.
Research Context
WebVoyager Browser Agent Benchmark Leaderboard (February 2026)
Browser agents reliably handle most standard web tasks in controlled settings, making the tension between capability and platform consent operationally real.
Production sites with anti-bot infrastructure block unidentified agents. The space between benchmark and deployment is exactly where the control-layer question sits.
Legal Flashpoint
"Undisclosed bot activity that masquerades as human clicks." That phrase, buried in Amazon's November 2025 complaint, deserves more attention than the lawsuit itself. Amazon alleges Perplexity's Comet browser spoofed standard Chrome user-agent strings to pass automated browsing off as human activity, then updated its evasion techniques within 24 hours of new detection measures going live.
The CFAA theory here is narrow and potent: the violation isn't accessing Amazon. It's accessing Amazon without saying you're an agent.
If courts accept that framing, every agentic browser operating on commercial platforms without explicit identity disclosure is carrying compliance risk. Jones Walker's analysis puts this in context: the case arrives just as NIST finalizes identity and authorization standards for autonomous agents. The simplest possible form of agent transparency, announcing what you are, became the legal fault line.
Further Reading
