My two cents: good market to be looking for good data folks who might want a (potentially remote) federal agency data job with shakiness in tech.
If it ever happened, I can already see the endless coverage by Sean Hannity and similar about how it's governmental overreach that risks destroying an important US company with X thousands employees...
However, I don't think it will ever happen, in the end it's one of the richest men, Jeff Bezos behind Amazon with significant influence on news reporting, who seems to be on good terms with both the Republicans and Democrats, and the regulatory agencies in the US just didn't show a pattern of going too hard against US companies.
When that happens, what would it take to convince you that the reason for the FDA’s decision is Amazon’s compliance with the law, rather than Jeff Bezos’s influence over the government and news media?
Sure; if the only piece of information under consideration is "the FDA did not shut Amazon down," Occam's Razor says that we should expect that to be because Amazon did not do anything that would lead to them being shut down.
But if we get to bring in all the information we have about what Amazon did do, much of which certainly appears to be conduct that would lead to some kind of regulatory penalty...well, then, it seems like it might be reasonable to consider alternative explanations for the outcome.
It also means that if things do get to such a point, then the action will come down swift and heavy in a manner generally agreeable to the majority of the commons.
Not in this universe. The more likely outcome is that Amazon shuts down the FDA.
It doesn't really hurt the Amazons, they're just distributors. Doesn't really even hurt me. If RTP is a part of my software product I should be under a microscope. It's going to be small people who try to market supplements who will get trounced now. Because every report will, by law, have to include the source of the product. And that source company or individual is in for a long year. Even shutting down won't end their legal obligations in a lot of cases.
On the other hand, that was, in part, the original point of the FDA. To stamp out the snake oil salesmen. So, yeah. I guess they're just carrying out that mandate in new and updated ways.
I'll omit brand names here, but I can tell you some sketchy stuff happens in supplement manufacturing all the time. During the ~6 years I worked there, only one letter came from the FDA after a whistleblower at a competitor's company came forward. The FDA sent a warning letter out to several of the large competitors in the industry to "don't do it or else" and never followed up again. The company that got in trouble got a few hundred thousand dollar fine for using mislabeled and toxic ingredients. They had one follow up inspection about 6 months after the warning and that was the end of it. For comparison that company was making ~$600M a year at the time of the fine and is now making $1B+. We carried on and never heard from the FDA again despite being equally guilty in our own company.
The guilt is what eventually led me away from the cash cow, where I went on an 18 month sabbatical to get away from any corporate greed for a little bit. I legitimately had nightmares that I would be complicity guilty of several crimes if I stayed there long enough.
I promise you, there is no oversight in supplements. There are a handful of posted guidelines. If a whistleblower comes forward the FDA might react to that single case, but they are so understaffed; the team that manages nutriceuticals is marked in the "tens" of people, not the thousands dedicated to proper medical equipment and medicines.
The FDA did try regulating supplements. They were legally prohibited from doing much.
You can thank Senator Orrin Hatch (who was the longest-serving Republican senator in history until recently) for preventing the FDA from regulating supplements back in 1994. [1] [2]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIT5_SMIaHE&t=6m46s (watch a few minutes of it from here)
Edit: Posted it here for those interested: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38797162
[2] https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/senate-bill/784
See
https://inspection.canada.ca/food-safety-for-industry/food-c...
I don't think it's an undue burden that if you're going to sell things people are ingesting, you have to know and communicate where they came from.
And I feel like small people that try to market supplements won't be especially damaged by this. It feels like as much as anything this would "hurt" small people that try to start a supplement manufacturing cottage-venture on a shoe string, over which I don't expect to lose any sleep.
I'm doing my first FDA-monitored automation project at a local brewery, and am quickly becoming familiar with the abundant controls that the FDA puts on domestic producers.
But the FDA is an American organization. Amazon or Ebay or Aliexpress or whoever may be just distributors, but they're international distributors. They're fully-automated self-service distributors for manufacturers in China and Russia and Indonesia and India who aren't subject to FDA jurisdiction, who sometimes aren't subject to any oversight at all.
The only entity that the FDA can go after here is Amazon, so this should hurt Amazon.
But the FCC's position is that if I as an electrical engineer want to sell my neighbor here in the US some custom PCB with an antenna, I need to go through testing that costs many thousands of dollars.
If an EE in Shenzhen wants to sell my neighbor the same PCB over Alibaba, Aliexpress, Banggood, Wish, Temu, Shein, Gearbest, or whatever new discount importer is hot I can't keep up anymore, or Ebay/Amazon/Target/Walmart.com, they're just going to create a listing and import it. The FCC simply cannot keep up.
What I don't understand is how they're getting through Customs and Border Patrol. If I want to ship a spare off-the-shelf PLC digital input card for a machine to one of my customers who has a satellite facility in Mexico, there's a 50% chance it gets held up for a month or more. Meanwhile these big distributors have no issues with air-freight shipments of a GPS jammer or raw testosterone direct to American doorsteps in 3 days.
Edit: it seems obvious to me that the CBP should be partially responsible verifying that stuff going through customs subject to FCC or FDA jurisdiction complies with FCC or FDA regulations, or at least to forward the question to the appropriate agency.
Everyone pays. Amazon for their part. The producer for their part. Anyone that is provably in between is held accountable as well. Usually it's the producer that gets hit the hardest. Not disagreeing with that. That's what should happen. Just listing another in a litany of reasons that it's far worse for the producer/manufacturer than for the distributor. Think about it, your grocer rarely suffers the same consequences that a poultry producer does in the event of a poultry recall for instance.