>This is a known dark pattern called "price anchoring friction."
It is and it really sucks.
>By hiding the price until cart, Amazon forces comparison shopping to happen inside their ecosystem rather than on Google.
If that's what they actually did all the time, you'd be right. However, pretty much all the time (except in the past few hours), Amazon does not do that.
All you need to do to confirm that is a web search. What's more, if that were the case, sites like CamelCamelCamel[0] couldn't exist. Yet they do.
Amazon is and does objectionable things all the time. If you wish to dump on Amazon, more power to you.
But if you're going to do so, why not do it based on actual issues and not ones you made up based on what appears to be a back end outage (which seems to be resolved now, with prices, as is normal, prominently displayed on product pages ) at Amazon over the past few hours?
[0] https://camelcamelcamel.com/
Edit: Removed extraneous and incorrect assertion.
