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Comment by ikeboy | Hacker News Reader

Apple legal had nothing to do with it. It was purely a business decision.

Apple wanted to control unauthorized (even authentic) sellers, Amazon wanted to buy directly from Apple and carry more of their products, they negotiated and reached an agreement.

Amazon has rolled out Transparency, which is a way for any brand, regardless of size, to cheaply block the vast majority of counterfeits by putting a unique label on every product. Brands can also file complaints against counterfeiters which get acted on very quickly.

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I am not a Amazon Seller, so this might be incorrect. I remember reading that to avail the unique label/id with the Transparency program, the Seller must use the Amazon provided unique label/id also for the units sold outside of Amazon. So in effect handing over your overall sales data to Amazon.

That is correct. The idea being that people should be able to sell authentic product even if purchased elsewhere.

That is a power play by Amazon. They could have implemented an open code generation algorithm where manufacturers could opt to generate their own codes signed by a public key, without sharing manufacturing quantities with Amazon, and accomplished the same thing, but chose not to.

I suppose a manufacturer with the current system could hide quantities by generating way more codes than they actually need and only using a small percentage of them.... even with that Amazon could detect which ones were scanned and how often, so the manufacturer would have to randomly scan the unused codes, and maybe rotate the IP addresses they use!

An open protocol not controlled by any one player would be much preferred.

Sure. In exchange for solving your entire counterfeit problem in one fell swoop, you give Amazon a bit of info. For anyone with significant issues with counterfeits, this is vastly cheaper and more effective than having to test order unauthorized sellers to see if the goods are authentic.

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