Fake reviews are illegal and subject to big fines under new FTC rules
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
LOL. Put a decent or at least nearly decent product on sale on Amazon. Accrue positive reviews. Switch product to pile of cac. Positive reviews sell pile of shite.
I do occasionally bother to leave a review for a product I have bought and I always specify it. Otherwise I am allowing Amazon to treat me and their other customers like a twat, which they do, with monotonous regularity.
It would be nice if Amazon didn't treat me and everyone else as twats. They will continue to manage to make more money than pure avarice in its wildest dreams could contemplate. You do have to wonder what on earth happens at a board meeting in these monsters.
The rules also forbid a few more shady tactics such as review “hijacking.” That’s when a merchant takes a product listing page filled with legitimate reviews and swaps in a different product that those customers never actually used. (Earlier this year, the FTC made its first enforcement action for this practice, fining a supplement maker $600,000 for doing this on Amazon.)
But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name, i.e. distinguishing from a major name change from a minor rephrase of the same product
Not sure how reliable ML is in that scenario
Amazon feels like one of those fake garbage websites that sometimes SEO their way to the frontpage of search results. For a long time I seriously had no idea it was even a real store.
Its funny amazon has major warehouses in poland and czechia (fulfillment to germany) but they dont even have czech store. You can buy from amazon.de and have it delivered to czechia but amazon doesnt compete on the market. They try with amazon.pl but i dont think its very popular. Lots of the other companies have things like pickup at physical stores (using packeta.com) or nonstop storage boxes that are everywhere in cities. Amazon would have hard time competing there so why bother.
It might show that amazon sttopped inventing in the space. I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
The UX is overwhelmingly bad, shipping usually costs more than the free shipping threshold on allegro - it just has no value proposition.
> I think its more likely that companies like that will start to successfully compete with amazon in germany. Then again amazon would probably just buy them if it was too threatening.
Why do these companies even sell out to Amazon given how much higher their potential value proposition is? Without heavy antitrust monopoly bullshit, I can't imagine Amazon competing with anything that actually tries to be an usable service.
Haven't used Allegro much since I've left the country. Heard that after they got bought by someone, they made some user hostile actions like greatly increased their comissions from each sale. Good to hear that. they are still strong and opposing Amazon.
Google already does this for games and apps on their play store.
You shouldn't have to sort because companies are showing you reviews for product A, but you are looking at product B. These aren't even reviewing the same product. It is dishonest, and the consumer shouldn't be the one with the responsibility here.
And photos, the original listing ones before the user ones.
This wouldn't help for example with different revisions of the same product, but still would do wonders against sellers recycling say reviews of a cat litterbox to sell a pair of shoes.
> But how to automatically discount reviews that don't match the new product name
That could really work but the discount should be 100% on the seller, otherwise Amazon would have no incentives.
Examples: A part gets obsoleted by vendor, sustaining engineering has to find a replacement. They conduct a small study to see how the new part works. The budget for conducting lengthy tests to determine if a simple change has any effect at the worst case tolerances is typically not there.
Suppliers quality changes over time. This is known as supplier quality fade. Suppliers will often underbid a part to win a contract. Then once volume ramps up they begin value engineering. Maybe they add more regrind material to an injection mold. Or they progressively begin to make the part slightly thinner on each subsequent batch. Maybe they begin to use a toxic filler material without notice.
An colleague literally had a situation in which a steel casting supplier was putting rocks in the castings.
Companies move injection mold tooling from vendor A to vendor B. The tooling might be the same but the settings are different, so the results are then different.
Without an excellent quality team that has money and time to check everything this will happen.
If you are competing in a marketplace with low margins there will never be enough money to check everything.
If you have a product which you keep calling FOO but has changed some spec in the new version (without hw change, perhaps you enabled some firmware option and now it can record 25 minutes instead of 20), it should get a new fingerprint. If it has changed a supplier for a chip, new fingerprint. And so on.
And aside from the fingerprint, you should also give all the entries that contributed to it (which when hashed in a structured function should give the same fingerprint), plus things like its production date.
Name="FOO", cpu.model="x-dragon-v5", cpu.supplier="Fukimata Japan", ..., fan.supplier="Fans-R-Us",...
Reviews then are tied to the product+fingerprint instead of just the product.
Don't forget that it needs to be automated as Amazon is too big to do this manually. And whatever rules you come up with can't be gamed.by creative lawyers.
Amazon is allowed to be smaller if it can't figure out how to do it profitably.
This is beyond ridiculous. Any company pulling in 3.2 billion in profit can easily increase costs without increasing prices just by accepting a little less profit. Hell, they could increase costs and lower prices and still be both highly profitable and sustainable by any sane definition of those words.
You might also be interested in the proportion of the operating income they do make that comes from AWS rather than retail:
Amazon choose to make investments which skew the profit margin.
They definitely have money to improve things like reviews, however they choose to invest it in other areas.
https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/21/20826405/amazons-profit...
Free cash flow isn't profit, and the way you measure whether something is worth investing in is against the opportunity cost. If they expect to invest a dollar in X and get back $1.25 and you say they have a dollar so they could invest it in Y that gets them back $1.03, the only reason for them to do that is out of charity, and the act of doing it would cost them $0.22 on the dollar.
And you're still not solving the problem, you're just moving it somewhere else. You say they could spend money on this instead of investing in something else, like Amazon Basics. Now Amazon Basics doesn't make batteries, or USB cables, or what have you. There is less competition in that market, so people have to pay more for that stuff.
It can't come out of what they're paying to shareholders because they never pay anything to shareholders.
> It makes poor people have to pay more to buy stuff.
Poor people aren't using Amazon because Amazon hasn't had the best prices online in years. You can get the same stuff for much cheaper on AliExpress or Walmart's retail and 3rd party marketplaces, or one of the dozens of other marketplaces online.
Bling has this rather weird feature that allows you to search for similar (product) imaged, I don't know how often it works but iirc it displays prices under the similar (read the same) products.
I think eventually that might become a desirable standard. A platform, interested in the long game, wouldn't want to sell the same goods for 4 to 50 times the regular price. Just like brick stores use to guarantee the lowest price.
Sam Vimes' boots:
Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
Also, lemon market:
When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
This is a silly economic theory. Rich people buy high quality goods that cost several times more money, often thousands of dollars as opposed to tens, for signaling reasons. Those products often are more durable, but not in proportion to how much more they cost. If a $1000 pair of boots lasts five times longer than a $50 pair of boots, you're still paying $750 more in the long run, and paying it as an up front cost, and taking a higher risk because anything that damages the high cost product is a bigger loss.
That isn't to say that you can never find a product which is such garbage that it costs more even though it costs less, but there is no reason to expect that to be the common case, and a big reason to expect the contrary: Sellers will try to charge more to people who can afford it even past the point that higher prices can cost-effectively improve quality, and rich people will pay those prices because they're less price-sensitive or more willing to pay for signaling.
> Poor people relying on a fake review are harmed by a greater proportion than are rich people who can afford to wait to send it back and get a refund.
You're making a proportionality argument here, but that's irrelevant. The question isn't what rich people do. It's if the amount it would cost to prevent fake reviews is more than the cost to ordinary people of them existing.
And the effect you're referring to only applies to a narrow range of products. If you order some paper towels and end up using napkins for a couple of days while they send some different ones, it's not a big deal. Conversely, if they send you an incompatible replacement battery for your device, you're stuck using the one that only lasts 15 minutes until you can get another one even if you make $100,000/year.
> When the buyers can't tell if they're being ripped off, there is a death spiral of quality on the market as the price that consumers will bear has to assume the risk of lemons, but only lemons can be profitability sold at low prices.
The assumption here is that Amazon reviews are the only means for people to evaluate quality. There are retailers that don't even have review systems and still don't become lemon markets because people can rely on third party reviews or brand reputation. And those systems are typically better because they're not tied to a retailer with a dominant market position, which improves competition in retail and routes around the perverse incentive of the retailer to host dishonest reviews.
> as Amazon is too big to do this manually
Amazon allowed a guy to build a dick-rocket for a trip to space. They can hire a hundred people to review those requests. Don't worry about poor Amazon not coping.
Why not allow linking back to the V1 version and its reviews from the V2 so shoppers can judge for themselves instead of having one take the place of the other?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/04/caveat-emptor-smr-di...
You also see this happen with retailers, where manufacturers work with retailers to build exclusive cheaper versions of existing products that use those products' names and packaging. You end up with situation where the Walmart version of your specific product is actually different than the ones sold everywhere else.
That’s their problem if they allowed themselves to grow so big they can’t manage their own store.
If they can’t handle product updates, they shouldn’t allow it.
Sprinkle some AI to it, and it becomes manageable.
Also, yes, they could spend some time to review the updated pictures for the listings or make it a paid feature for the sellers. They could even use AI to compare descriptions and if USB-flash drive becomes 1TB SSD drive, they could flag that.
They love money and fees. They can offer a review process to keep reviews for a new version once manually reviewed and confirmed as substantially the same product, perhaps with new images of new packaging.
There were cases were Amazon's own product pages were hijacked like that in the past...
Try browsing through your oldest Amazon orders--you may very well see something you didn't buy at those links now.
This feature exists on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, etc.
If you don't, how do you fix a listing error?
If this is not the case it's that Amazon does not care.
Something simple like either you delete the reviews or you pay to have your changes reviewed. If it is important to you to change everything it must be worth something.
Just because something is difficult to automate doesn't mean it's not worth doing.
Sometimes it does mean that.
The number of updates to product listings is large and the proportion of updates that are scams is low. That means you need to be thorough enough to not have false positives or your false positives will outweigh actual scams by a big margin. Which means high cost per inspection. But then you have to apply the high cost inspection to all the updates that aren't scams.
It's completely plausible that the cost of doing this could exceed the cost of the scams, i.e. doing it isn't worth it.
To prevent this you need actual criminal penalties, because going to jail is a deterrent in a way that having your account closed when you can just turn around and sign up for another one is not.
The problem is, there is no guarantee that it's worth more than it costs.
Regardless, simply version the product on change and only show reviews for the current version would do the trick.
If you don't go after Amazon, the issue continues. If you don't go after the supplement seller, they rebrand and/or just start selling elsewhere and keep up their deceptive practices.
Amazon banned me from leaving reviews years ago because I'd leave negative reviews when I had negative experiences with the products I bought. Turns out they don't like that, and it leaves me wondering how many bad reviews go unseen because they're blocked from being written in the first place.
Though I guess they don’t care because they get their cut. I don’t even think they pay for the returns as they’d pass that on to the seller.
Theres likely plenty of businesses which have legitimately engaged and not pulled the switch, but you would still receive the counterfeit product due to the manner in which Amazon handles and fulfills orders (big bin of products from any vendor that labels thier product as X without any checking to validate it's legitimacy).
Thank you! There is no way of knowing otherwise. This is also true for genuine listings where multiple versions are offered.
There is also a more general problem with this because this is also true for OEMs using the same name for fastly different products (i.e. router with different SoC, TVs with different panel technologies, SSDs with different controller and/or cache). And in that case it's just hard to even leave a proper review because you might not know that other versions exist and how to distinguish.
The issue is mostly the same and the intention is often also the same (but not necessarily).
Find products I'm interested in using their search. This is harder than it sounds, because Amazon's search is horrible.
Filter results by aggregate user ratings. Only consider anything 4.5 stars or higher. In rare cases when product is more niche or I know people have unrealistic expectations and leave reviews like: "coffee maker didn't brush my teeth, 1 star" I make an exception.
Filter remaining products by number of orders. Products with high aggregate rating and lots of orders are far more likely to be better.
Then after all that read a few of the negative reviews to see if there are any systemic flaws, e.g. poor hinges that give out quickly.
Then I pick the cheapest product out of the remaining ones. Usually...unless, like a good consumer, I'm addicted to a particular brand.
I know we all think of Amazon as an American company that sells legitimate products like books, but why should we have thought it would be any different from a 2nd or 3rd world marketplace? There's no harm to it once you view it with the same level of suspicion that any average Thai person views the home goods sold on the street.
The only issue is that Americans aren't adapted to thinking critically about what they're being sold. They're adapting, and they will learn, because they're no longer a first world country.
TL;DR: It's not that you're being treated like a twat, it's that you actually are a twat if you're still trying to buy shit on Amazon.
I do find it comforting that a pretty niche en_GB insult has been swilled around the gobs of enough people on the planet, that it is recognisable to a Thailander (bit of an assumption). That implies to me that due to the power of the internet (anyone can talk to anyone) a lot of messages are transcending some huge boundaries. This one is a rather obscure and a rather juvenile insult, but I'm sure rather more positive messages get through too.
I should probably point out to anyone that doesn't know, that "twat" is a euphemism for female genitalia.
I will ask that you don't conflate all english speakers with the USofA, quite a few other countries speak english too as a first language. I don't take offence - they are starting to shape up quite well (bless). I'm also not too sure about trotting out the first -> third world thing is too useful these days - that's all a bit last century or earlier. I like to think we have moved on somewhat since then. However, if you think it is still a useful way to categorize parts of the planet - let's debate that.
Oh but like per your question... who's gonna defend anyone from an unscrupulous butcher selling someone cat meat, and stuff, Like, no one. That's how it is everywhere else in the world. Amazon is just a rampant zoo of it all in one place, exposing all this deadly garbage to naive first worlders for the first time... but it's just backwash.
What? Don't you have trading standards officers (UK) or something similar in your part of the world? Or something like Mattilsynet in Norway? These organizations are responsible for exactly that kind of policing.
Glad your problem turned out to be fairly benign, although I'm sure painful and worrisome! Who knows what they put into those products.
Customs and the FTC are the US agencies tasked with protecting consumers and the market from counterfeit products. I would imagine there are various national and local agencies for different types of products. It appears they could step up enforcement a bit.
My experience with counterfeits was at average liquor stores though, not actual vape shops. 7-11 and other convenience stores also sell these disposable vape pens and from what I've gathered, most of the disposables are fraudulent. Supposedly dedicated vape stores are better about selling legitimate items, though I imagine it varies.
'Dogma', board meeting scene.
specify what? that you bought it?
Amazon may owe the FTC more money than the world's annual GDP.
The article and rules make clear that this applies to the companies writing and submitting fraudulent reviews, not the platforms hosting them.
(If Amazon wrote a bunch of its own fake 5-star reviews for products under its own label, then this would apply in that case. But considering how many Amazon-brand products have terrible ratings, there's no reason to believe they've ever engaged in that practice.)
That would catch Amazon if fake reviews were left on sold-by-Amazon products (and Amazon should have known that that was happening), but that seems unlikely unless Amazon is trying to violate the rule. Amazon disseminates a lot of fake reviews, even fake reviews that it has reason to believe are fake, but those are presumably not for Amazon's own products.
Under most reasonable definitions the seller of record should in fact be Amazon and not the person who amazon calls a seller....
As usual, corporations manipulate language to undermine government and citizen actions against thier misdeeds
Big if, but if these rules go into effect, I wonder if maybe reviews being harder to solicit could result in more consolidation of model numbers to concentrate the review scores?
My prior assumption was that Amazon took a page from Walmart's playbook and would, ahem, borrow ideas for only the best/top-selling products.
And here's a 1 star item but it only has 1 review: https://www.amazon.com/low-rated-item-varenc-found2/dp/B09Z6...
I'm guessing after you hit some number of reviews and the average is less than 3, Amazon doesn't let you list it anymore. Which is funny considering Amazon lets you filter search results on 1-star or 2-star items only and up. Seems like that filter option exists just to make you feel like the higher star ratings are more meaningful.
This is like claiming that a kingpin could shutdown crime on his street - why would he, he gets a cut
> It is an unfair or deceptive act or practice and a violation of this Rule for a business to use or repurpose a consumer review written or created for one product so that it appears to have been written or created for a substantially different product, or to cause such use or repurposing.
Honestly, all fine products, nothing's broken etc. and I was very happy with such an amazing value for under $10. Werw they even fake reviews?
What does that have to do with the proposed rule? There is a rule against substituting in an unrelated product to get credit for reviews that were originally written for something else. Making a new batch of your product that is cheaper and worse than the old batch is allowed.
> Review Hijacking: Businesses would be prohibited from using or repurposing a consumer review written for one product so that it appears to have been written for a substantially different product. The FTC recently brought its first review hijacking enforcement action.
The scenario is explicitly part of the new rule, even if you'd otherwise have given it a five star review.
They're not giving you free products just for fun. One of the reasons is to get hundreds or thousands of good reviews
The parent poster describes a chain of six free products. They're clearly not doing this as a charity exercise.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/06/...
"Federal Trade Commission Announces Proposed Rule Banning Fake Reviews and Testimonials"
To reach moderators, send email to hn@ycombintor.com
Reference this post by URL or ID (36556228) in the subject line for faster processing, and the alternate URL you're suggesting in the body of your email along with a brief rationale, e.g., "link disambiguation".
I usually do this myself, though in this case arguably WaPo are adding relevant commentary and analysis. That said the direct FTC link is useful to have in this thread.
What is your proposed alternative?
How would that impact upon HN's own operations and resource demands?
This is not 1990. All forum platforms have this function. (bb, vbulletin, discourse, etc.) I can't even understand why this is being discussed. :)
- There's already a click-based interaction mechanism, the "flag" link. That's non-specific ("here be problems"), but also means that any type of issue can be reported with only a single mechanism and reporting flow.
- Yes, a more complex workflow for issue reporting could be constructed. Those ... tend to be complicated, not be especially useful, often omit the specific concern the reporter has in mind, and if overly arduous, result in people simply selecting the first option and moving on. Such systems can also become ossified and/or brittle over time, where an email-based system is inherently flexible and adaptable.
- Reporting links can also be abused by bots, web scrapers, and the rest, which means limiting them to registered members, and perhaps a subset of those (as is the case with HN's "flag" link). Email is the Universal Reporting Mechanism as I've noted in another comment on this thread.
- Email is sufficiently non-structured to address a wide range of issues. The one standardisation I've been asked to provide is to include the specific item ID in the subject of the email. This lets mods pull up the item directly using macros written for that purpose. I suspect that often the issue is reasonably apparent on doing so.
- I make extreme efforts to keep my standard-issue emails brief, clearly identify the post and source link, and suggest a remedy, all in consideration of moderator time. I suspect many other frequent reporters do likewise. Mods do respond typically within an hour to a day, and will often fix issues well before responding.
Moderator time is a capacity limitation: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27398725>
Throwing more messages (not necessarily signal) onto the queue likely won't help that. Keep in mind that spurious or abusive reports are frequent characteristics of such systems.
Who precisely is being "gatekept" through a reliance on email? Even this highly-pseudonymous space alien cat replying to you now manages to get through that particular hurdle, and in fact, anyone, whether they have an HN account or not, who does have an email account (much of the online public) can at least in theory reach HN mods.
So, say, if you happen to be some third party who's being affected, abused, misrepresented, etc., on HN, it's possible to reach moderators directly with no further site interactions required.
Contrast with virtually all online ticketing or contact systems which otherwise mandate a site-specific account or profile.
FTC announces proposed rule banning fake reviews and testimonials (211 points, 84 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36542500
Doesn’t this section make it contradictory for Amazon to sell their own products or would this section only apply to dedicated review/opinion websites?
> Overall 4.7 stars:
> [Photo of sock] 4.9 stars from 17,000 reviews "very comfy!"
> [Photo of expensive electronics] 1.3 stars from 13 reviews "this garbage lit itself on fire."
Say, Pyrex's gradual substitution of less-durable materials in its baking and cooking glassware. That won't appear in a simple photo.
That will probably also disincentivise users from leaving reviews because users will see their reviews disappear.
And actually what's to stop people changing a listing if they're not happy with the current set of reviews?
Some kind of slick UI to highlight differences from current listing to previous listing for a review might be a solid scalable compromise
Amazon saves me a great deal of time. Before Amazon, I'd have to spend 2 hours going to the mall and back, and face a very limited selection there. Now I spend 5 minutes and it drops on my doorstep, sometimes even that evening.
Time means a lot to me. I'll put up with a lot to save time.
I used to pay $60 per order for overnight delivery from electronics distributors. Same-day is faster and almost free. Life is good :)
The platforms make the sellers to dispatch stuff in the time period they've listed in the description.
I'd imagine some of the price difference is attributable to the kind of conduct you may find objectionable - assuming this is the reason why you're looking for alternatives.
It’s AWS
Sorry, I'm trying to figure this out and have been having a hard day on this forum with all the subtext. Was your personal expenditure on Amazon enough to impact their revenue to the point where it would be noticeable?
-- H.L. Mencken
Sometimes rendered as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Provenance: <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/03/01/underestimate/>.
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/12/ny-ag-doles-out-wrist-sl...
https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2023/05/15/fake_net_neutrali...
Take Airbnb, which became personal for me when I found out my reviews (of 3 and 4 stars) were edited or deleted. And where the last few Airbnb's were generally not good experiences (toilet requiring physically pushing stuff down, another one where bed was adjacent to wall with elevator machinery, another with 3 restaurants outside the ground floor courtyard including seating outside the house).
I discovered that in the Airbnb subreddit, hosts have common tips for how to remove bad reviews. Easy, just say that it violates the guidelines because: "there is a complaint about something the host cannot control"
That's it. It's that easy, and now information discovery by the consumer becomes difficult, as they see 4.8 star reviews with glowing positivity.
I'm skeptical but that's what they need to crack down on, that grey area where you make fake/arbitrary guidelines for reviews and ONLY delete the negatives.
Same thing happened to me on Amazon, I had pickling jars that all universally cracked in the fridge, and my review was deleted because it violated guidelines.
It's not just a bot or fake sponsorship issue, it's also a biased sampling game: delete the negative, leave the positive.
e.g. does selective review farming qualify? I can't count the number of apps that ask something to the effect of "do you like this app Yes/No" where "No" funnels to an internal feedback form and "Yes" to the play store review page. Including to my recollection first party google apps and other big name publishers/companies.
To my opinion, 'of course' this should be illegal -- and I try and rate the apps that pull this crap a 1/5 when I stumble on to it.
So how are they going to enforce this? The FTC says codifying rules can help it be much more efficient in court — but it isn’t actually getting any additional enforcement resources. It could also still face hurdles trying to go after offending businesses that are based overseas, if they’re in countries that don’t have a history of working with the FTC
A couple of years ago I bought a speaker bar for my computer monitor. It hummed like crazy even when turned off. So I returned it and posted a 1 star review.
Then the seller began to email with various “I’m just a little seller and this will hurt me” emails - despite there being thousands of reviews. Each email offered a progressively larger money offers to take my review down. Which I never took.
It bugged me that I could not amend my review to note this. I could have I suppose, but it would have led to my actual product review being taken down.
Or harassing sellers to leave feedback for every sale when positive feedback is literally the only option (ebay).
Brazil standing in marked contrast.
Every commercial on TV, radio and online is filled with lies and incomplete truths, missing facts, otherwise marketing people could never sell a single thing especially to valuable impulse buyers.
Then there is the problem the FTC might have more power than the FDA with food and supplements. Every time any independent test is done pulling random products from random stores they never test accurate to what is listed on the label, even the dose size in single ingredient pills is always wrong unless it is USP
Nutrition labels are completely self-reported and often very wrong. Why isn't that tested every single day by the government with big fines to stop it?
As to "Why isn't that tested every single day by the government with big fines to stop it?" in the supplement industry, it's because the FDA isn't allowed to regulate supplements by law.
- mobile phone applications: storefront (app store, google play) review are well known to be manipulated, and whatever is done to control the issue is clearly loosing. - video games: Steam is also well known to be a battleground for so-called review bombing and counter review bombing. Although Steam is very good at providing data to understand the context of the review, it clearly caters to a specific audience.
Glassdoor is more egregious because of the anonymity it tries to provide for the reviewers and how authenticity and veracity o statement would be very difficult to assess.
Everything should have a semver and reviews should be attached to a revision number.
- Abraham Lincoln
What’s the catch? Why would Amazon allow this?
Well, each year (in the US, at least) a fresh batch of aroun 4 million people turns 18 years old. Even if every one of them in a given year was completely convinced by this effort, that would leave the work undone for the inexorable flow of future young adult cohorts.
I reckon all you've got to do to pull this off is to commandeer one of the two dominant political parties and hoist your educational agenda to the top of its political platform. You'll need to be super diligent to ensure that this influence extends down through the state, county, and municipal governments and is effectively implemented at all the local school districts. Not quite sure how to extend this to home schools.
But otherwise, this is a splendid idea.
Why do people expect a functioning sewage system, instead of traking their poop to the ocean themselves?
Why do they expect the beach to be free of excrement, instead of cleaning it themselves? Why do they expect a recycling dystem to actually recycle plastic instead of defrauding them and dumping it in malasia?
Well, then they also expect the reviews to be non-fraudulent?
That's part of the point I made below, these kind of rules are so easy to skirt as to render them irrelevant. The law just becomes one more way that scammers can claim legitimacy.
The FTC commissioners are appointed by the President, an elected official. Congress creates government bodies as departments or commissions depending on whether it wants them to directly report to the executive or have some independence from it.