It's really not that simple. The regulations here benefit Amazon. This is why Facebook is asking to be regulated. It's called regulatory capture. It's a product of corporatism or cronyism. Established corporations lobby for regulations that shut out small business and protect their profits.
Yes, because this adds cost to manufacturing. Imagine if you yourself wanted to make and sell children's jewelry. How difficult would it be for you to get a lab to test all of the stuff you make? Could you make any money after you subtract the cost of these kinds of lab tests?
A large company has economies of scale. Finding a lab is a much smaller portion of the cost for them compared to you.
But I'm sure I must have missed why this general principle couldn't be used for other things that we don't want to be toxic.
Saying that the onus should be on stores is crazy, unless you accept that a company should have exclusive rights to your product at which point it become a licensed product and would probably be branded as such.
The catch is when they buy materials (like paint) that are cheaper because they don't comply. Either because they are made for a market with different regulations, or they have been contaminated some how.
Manufacturers may need to get certifications from suppliers about the materials meeting the regulations, but these won't be the cheapest option.
Regulatory capture is a useful concept, but please don’t just parrot it for any case related to regulation. As seen here, it is now used most often as a cudgel against any sort of regulation, and that’s exactly what they wanted all along.
- this settlement applies to Amazon only, not any competitor. That doesn’t fit the usual mechanism of using regulation to shackle competition
- regulatory capture also refers to a social mechanism, where regulators become friends with the industry because they spend so much time together etc. That doesn’t fit too well here, because a state attorney’s office is far more diversified than, say, the FAA.
- the points in my initial comment, which you just ignored
>This supposed “insight” is on its way to become just another tired meme.
On the other hand, people were explicitly talking about regulation, which I took to mean as a wider-reaching thing than just this agreement Amazon made. In this specific case, Amazon is basically acting like the government for the sellers.