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Comment by whack | Hacker News Reader

It is very hard to eliminate false-positives without introducing a raft of false-negatives as well. If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire. Especially those who don't fall under the umbrella of Amazon's good graces. Is that really what you want?

More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform? There have certainly been many politicians who wanted to regulate the internet as a whole, similar to how you've asked for Amazon to be regulated. Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior that happens on their networks, and were expected to police all internet traffic they were routing?

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> Would society be better off if ISPs were held liable for any fraud/unlawful behavior

Not a good analogy, ISPs are dumb pipes. Amazon boosts and profits from bad actors. None of them would have a chance to get the reach Amazon provides them. Of course Amazon should be held accountable. I don't buy the "open platform" angle when it comes to FB, Google, etc.

Especially when they've demonstrated countless times they aren't platforms. I find this when-it's-convenient form of claiming they're platforms particularly galling.

Sure, but we're talking about directional shifts. Do you want Amazon to move in the direction of being a laissez faire platform that is open to everyone? Or do you want it to move in the direction of being a tightly controlled ecosystem where all merchants are at the whims of Amazon's corporate overlords? Your suggestion would move Amazon towards the latter

> where all merchants are at the whims of Amazon's corporate overlords

Very dramatic. If you don't want to be subject to Amazon, run your own shop. It's easier than ever before. I really don't understand how counter-fitters should be under any kind of protection by Amazon. And why Amazon should not be held to a standard that does not make them accomplices to black sheep.

If you held Amazon liable for anything bad a 3rd party merchant ever does, they will react by clamping down on all unverified merchants, and a lot of small/medium businesses will find themselves caught in the crossfire.

Amazon could handle that problem by helping the small merchants more though. Bezos does claim to be "obsessed with the customer" after all, and those businesses are his customers.

Allowing people who buy things on Amazon to get fake products is failing everyone in the whole supply chain apart from the business that supplies the fakes and Amazon itself. If I were Bezos I'd be quite unhappy about that.

The internet and Amazon do not share an important characteristic: openness. I don't need the internet's permission to publish and this makes the tradeoff with chaos acceptable. Basically we trade order over freedom.

Now that you say it, I wouldn't mind seeing a concept of search neutrality and/or platform neutrality developped.

I'd go further: neutral platforms should be the norm. If then someone wants to build a walled garden fine, but there must be a neutral alternative by default.

>Is that really what you want?

Yes, if that's what it takes.

> Is that really what you want?

Yes, exactly that, since they've proven to be so utterly inept (or complicit) when it comes to regulating counterfeit products.

> More generally speaking, do we believe there's any value in having open platforms with platform-owners who aren't trying to police every single actor using the platform?

Amazon's not just an "open platform" here. Through deliberate features of their logistics system and customer-facing storefront, the primary branding on anything bought via Amazon is _Amazon's_.

Take for example the FBA program with shared stocking. Amazon relies on a supplier's assertion that their goods are not counterfeit and are identical to others of the same SKU, but it then repeats that representation to the consumer on Amazon's own behalf.

The advantage of Amazon's model is that it provides an integrated storefront, but it is not an "open platform" as a result. eBay is closer to an open platform, and there the difference between individual sellers is a first-order feature, where even sellers of identical goods manage their own listings and product descriptions.

At the very least Amazon should not be allowed (and fined if they do) to replace genuine articles from one merchant by stuff from another, just because the second one promises to deliver the exact same thing.

Apparently you can get “brand protection” in some special cases, but it should be default.

It may be hard when you have Amazon's business model. Op's point is that the law should not change just to avoid Amazon problems.

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