If you joined Amazon Prime in the last decade, it likely took you a single click. If you tried to leave, you entered a battlefield designed by behavioral economists to break your will. Internal documents unsealed in the FTC's 2023 antitrust lawsuit revealed that Amazon engineered a cancellation process so deliberately labyrinthine that they code-named it Project Iliad—a direct reference to Homer’s epic poem about the long, arduous siege of Troy.

The objective was simple: Friction. By 2017, Amazon’s leadership noticed that making cancellation easy was "hurting the bottom line." The solution was a multi-page, multi-click obstacle course known internally as the "Iliad Flow." This dark pattern reduced Prime cancellations by 14% immediately upon launch—a metric executives celebrated while privately describing the user manipulation as an "unspoken cancer."