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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

Four hours in and I don't see any comment here with the right take on it, so here you go: Amazon is not suing these 1,000 "John Does" in order to win, they're suing them in order to identify them and ban their Amazon accounts.

Once Fiverr is forced to divulge all the info it has regarding these people, Amazon will ban their accounts and drop the lawsuit.

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That's a lot of money to spend to not follow through and put the last nail in the coffin.

What money? They have lawyers on payroll and filing fees are minimal. Their direct outlays so far in the three figures.

And I don't get what "following through" is supposed to mean? Trying to convince a judge that someone who got $5 for posting a review on Amazon encouraging people to buy from Amazon has damaged Amazon's business and should pay $XXX because of it? Multiplied by 1,000 defendants? That would be the laughable part. And that's the part Amazon won't be doing.

Doubtful. I'm sure they'll ban whomever they are able to identify, but there are most definitely other reasons this suit will develop into a storm. Fiverr threatens Amazon's business model, and Amazon will do anything to keep turning a profit.

I'll be EXTREMELY shocked if Amazon drops more than just a couple of these suits, they're out to prove a point that THEY run the market, and not Fiverr.

You may be right about Amazon's intent, I don't know. But Fiverr is no threat to Amazon's business model. Even if Fiverr's purpose were fake reviews (it isn't), reviews aren't a key component of Amazon's business model in the first place. And there are plenty of cheaper, faster, and less likely to create bad PR ways Amazon could put a stop to fake reviews if they really felt threatened by them. For starters, it would be very simple to (a) only allow verified purchase reviews if the user bought the product via Amazon, and (b) make sure all verified purchase reviews are shown before any others (or larger, or not greyed out, etc., etc.). The fact that Amazon hasn't done these things tells me they consider fake reviews a nuisance, not a threat.

You think a quarter-trillion dollary company hasn't thought about letting users freelance on top of the Amzn distribution model? Don't make me laugh! They want to play 'good guy' here because they can get easier data collection if they don't have to verify customers for reviews, and it allows for customer conversion if someone sees that the product is in fact what they want from reading the reviews. They want the identities for that very reason of removing who could be faking it, but I think you're absolutely right that they don't feel threatened by the reviews themselves.

Fiverr is the threat here, and that's a good thing. Either way, I'm buying from Jet from now on.

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