Tech Crunch:

Amazon is refusing to comply with a request from the Federal Trade Commission to implement stricter controls that would prevent children from making in-app purchases.

The FTC is demanding Amazon implement a “consent” model similar to the one Apple conceded to earlier this year, according to a letter Amazon to the FTC Tuesday. Amazon believes it already has implemented effective parental controls consistent with the model the FTC settled on with Apple, and it says it refunded customers who complained of children making in-app purchases without their permission.

From Amazon’s letter to the FTC:

The main claim in the draft complaint is that we failed to get customers’ informed consent to in-app charges made by children and did not address that problem quickly or effectively enough in response to customer complaints. We have continuously improved our experience since launch, but even at launch, when customers told us their kids had made purchases they didn’t want we refunded those purchases.

A precedent has been set, by Apple, building a consistent, reasonable approach to controlling in-app purchases. The sense here is that Amazon does not want to take on the infrastructure associated with those controls.

If Amazon is basing their claim on refunding in-app purchases, no questions asked, they should make that a policy, as opposed to something they did at launch. If they don’t want to do that, then perhaps they should consider disallowing in-app purchases altogether. Or just go with the Apple thing.