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Comment by tfourb | Hacker News Reader

"It's hard" should not be an excuse for not preventing fraud. Most arguments from tech companies boil down to "but we would have to spend some of our billions of dollars of annual profits or venture capital to prevent this and those jobs wouldn't be sexy engineer stuff, so why would you want us to do something like this." I never understood how/why these companies are getting away with this, given that fraud/abusive behavior in other parts of the economy is taken quite seriously.

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This is the same argument I have when people say "YouTube is too big to moderate properly".

If it's too big to keep legal, maybe it's too big. It was YouTube's choice to allow everyone to upload as much as they like.

It's an interesting question though on whether that allowing everyone to upload as much as they like is a sufficient benefit for society at large though, to change the equation where the argument that it's too big to moderate properly makes sense and is a valid defense.

(I personally come down on the side of "it is valid").

When you put it like that...isn't society too big to moderate properly? Like the point is in trying; we have laws and try to enforce them and stuff...but that doesn't stop perps & victims from slipping through the cracks, or societal injustice that aren't addressed until much later or never at all.

Expensive ~= effortful, meaning that it would take a lot of human labor, which would otherwise be contributing differently in the economy, at Amazon or elsewhere.

Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.

This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.

Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.

That’s all yet another instance of “not my problem.” Can’t prevent fraud on your e-commerce site? Maybe you should not be running one.

Couldn't Amazon just say the same thing? 'Not my problem, we offer full refund and if that isn't good enough you can take your business elsewhere'

No. You can’t “not my problem” your way out of being an accessory to fraud.

Why not? It seems like getting a full refund is a pretty big mitigation.

What other crimes do you think should allow the “not my problem” defense? A crime is still a crime even if full restitution is made.

There's a pretty long list. If someone sells a fraudulent product by mail, I don't hold the mail carrier accountable. If I buy a product I don't like on Craigslist, I don't hold them accountable.

The mail carrier does not advertise the fraudulent product and does not handle the financial transaction. There is a pretty obvious difference between a mail carrier and Amazon. Craigslist actually is responsible for stuff that is offered on their website, see also the long-running debates about sex workers advertising on Craigslist.

Craigslist is responsible for sex stuff only due to a very specific and stupid law.

Do you think it's ok if I steal from you as long as I promise to return whatever you notice?

It is not only the customer who suffers damage, but also the seller of legitimate merchandise who is not compensated by Amazon for fraudulent sales. Also, Amazon 100% has a spreadsheet somewhere calculating the share of customers who don't bother claiming fraud compensation.

Do you think Amazon cares? If most customers keep coming back, then Amazon is happy. If they have enough sellers too.

Just think about all the meaningful local mom and pop jobs that gave back to the community that Amazon destroyed in the name of putting bezos in the top two richest men alive. Maybe the judge should consider that and just demolish them.

Sadly, "we" voted with our dollars. The invisible hand at work.

(Anymore, I don't by anything but detergent, screen protectors & phone cases from AMZN, ftr.)

Were you actually stuck shipping at only the local "Mom and Pop" shops at any point? There's a reason Walmart/Amazon crushed them all.

I shop to get cool stuff. Not to convey meaning.

And what of the time, money, and environmental resources used by the customer who must spend more time estimating the reliability of irrelevant reviews and have to make time to schedule and execute a return? Doesn't that also take from "growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services," and consuming more products -- and with much less efficiency and predictability?

Yes, it certainly does. That's my point. Everything takes effort. One way the market might sort this out is that Amazon hires a bunch of people to do this on your behalf, freeing you up to spend more time on activities more productive than performing due diligence on your online products yourself. They would raise prices a bit, but then you'd also have a bit more income. Perhaps this would be a net win overall.

But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.

If Amazon's retail profit relies on allowing fraud and illegal activity to happen with their knowledge, that's just not something we should accept. Making more money for shareholders shouldn't happen at the expense of knowingly defrauding customers. The decision to not prevent fraud on Amazon just means the cost of dealing with that fraud is borne by the customers.

On the other hand, we balance health hazards to the public against economic activity.

"Minimal risk while still permitting economic growth / treating disease" vs "no risk"

It's fair to apply the same standards to internet companies. A hyper efficient Amazon has social benefits.

(That said, I agree that the optimal point for Amazon and most internet companies is a lot stricter than how our current laws are enforced)

This clearly falls into "fraud waiting to happen" rather than "minimal risk" though. It's fairly simple to treat Amazon as the actual seller and just hold them liable if there is false advertising. There's a difference for a Shopify type system that gives individual sellers their own storefront or Ebay where the seller is clearly communicated, but Amazon often obscures the seller info and represents itself as the seller so it seems fair and reasonable.

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