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.