Amazon.com was one of the first (if not THE first) online booksellers, and in many terms, defined what made a good e-commerce site. They keep in contact with their customers, charge decent prices, and in general make things pretty easy for Joe Schmo to buy a book (and now movies, music, toys, etc) online.

Well, a while back, they got a patent for 1-click shopping (which in my mind is a bunch of hooey), which also raised some eyebrows. Well, now they have gone yet another step further, and are charging different users different prices, for DVDs, anyway. According to the article, prices for the same DVD changed based upon browser type (higher for Internet Explorer users than Netscape).

This, in my humble opine, is pretty damned brave. They say they are just conducting an experiment on consumer trends, etc. Well, one could also assume from their test cases that people who use IE are stupid, too. Or Netscape users are cheap. Or Amazon likes Netscape better. Is this all some anti-Microsoft ploy? Well, all of those are probably completely false, but to make my point, this could turn out badly for Amazon, unless they cough up some answers.