Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales
reuters.com
reuters.com
Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
>Given the unprecedented size of the proposed class consisting of 288 million members, the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store, Plaintiffs have not—and cannot demonstrate that a class action would be manageable.
The "individualized issues" references arguments presented earlier in the filing. They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. You might disagree with Amazon's lawyers here, but it's unfair to characterize it as "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable". It's an "wild" argument because it's a strawman.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...
> we've wronged too many people to be held accountable
Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be?
In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
> Chun found there was no evidence at this stage that the size of the class was overbroad. Other federal courts had certified class actions with millions or hundreds of millions of class members, the judge said.
The flip side to Amazons argument though is that if the judge decided the class was too big they could break into multiple classes and Amazon would end up defending themselves on multiple fronts. Usually companies facing these things want to roll it all into a single class for that reason alone.
You missed the other 2 of the 3 parts of that argument.
>In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
I'm not saying they're objectively right, just that there's more to the argument than "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable".
Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
It really wasn't. If you look at the table of contents, the part about was the class being too big was:
1. in one of the two top level arguments (II)
2. of (II), it was one of 6 sub-arguments (F)
3. of (F), the actual argument is "Plaintiffs Have Not Satisfied Rule 23(b)(3)’s Superiority Requirement.", of which the class was too big was one of three factors. For reference the other two are "the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store"
>Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
It really isn't. The specific legal standard is that if the total time to adjudicate all the class members is large, then class certification should be denied. This seems reasonable to me, at least in isolation. What's the point of a legal case that takes so long to resolve that by the time it's finished, everyone involved would be dead? Again, you might not agree with Amazon's argument that it's too complex to be resolved, and it's fine to deride them for thinking that the case is too complex for the court system to handle, but they're simply not making the claim that they should be let off the hook on the basis of 300 million plaintiffs alone.
But, hey, I'm just a rando on the internet. Feel free to disregard this comment.
No-one's suing Amazon for this on an individual basis. And nor is any lawyer taking this case for a few bucks (literally).
That doesn't mean there has been a wrong. That's part of the purpose of a class action.
> If a lawsuit ends up taking 100 years because that's long it takes to adjudicate each class member (which was the case in a prior unrelated lawsuit)
Citation?
Shkreli made back all the money from his clients that he misappropriated (by gambling with Retrophin shares). He still went to jail for fraud.
And people outside the US as well, though those would likely have to be separate legal matters.
Evil corp got away with it once. All evil corps should be able to do the same is not a sane argument.
But it is an argument to add regulations and make large corporations accountable as soon as possible. So, make them pay for their past damage and force them to have better practices from now on.
lower than what?
Class actions, as an alternative to the normal direct action lawsuits, are an accommodation in the legal system for economy of justice; a class that is too diverse in how they are situated with respect to the issues raised (which is a more accurate summary than the article’s “too large” for Amazon’s argument) negate that function.
I’m not saying the court ruled incorrectly on Amazon’s argument, just that the article is misleading on what the argument actually is.
Plucky startup takes the 'ask forgiveness rather than permission' approach and ignores a bunch of regulations, legal system doesn't care because they're just a plucky startup.
10 or so years later plucky startup is a massive corpo, another 5 or so years later the legal system catches up but they're a massive corpo making piles of cash and the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.
Examples? Usually when I see this argument being brought up, it's usually something like "[multinational megacorp] fined $x for breaking Belgian privacy laws", and then people pile in saying how "$x is 1% of [multinational megacorp]'s turnover" and therefore the fine is just "a cost of doing business", but neglecting to account for how much % of their revenue is in Belgium, or how much money they could have plausibly gained from the offenses in question.
Apparently, your personal information is worth about $2.90.
How much money did they make from the breach though? The argument made by the gp was that the fines were "pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.". According to FTC's press release, they were fined at least $575M for "failure to take reasonable steps to secure its network". How much do you think did you think equifax saved by skimping on security? Probably not $575M. They got pwned by an outdated third party library. There's no way keeping your libraries up to date is going to cost anywhere near that amount.
Also, it's not only about the cost avoided, but about the damage to the people while you were doing that. If you're making money moving logging trucks, you skimp 50 dollars per trip in some straps to fix the load, and then a couple logs fall, run over a car, and almost kill a bunch of people, I'm not expecting you to pay just for the 50 dollars and the car repair.
Again, how much do you think Equifax saved from skimping on security? Sure, spending $575M would have prevented the hack, but how much did they have to spend to be considered not negligent?
I took their post to mean that the $2.90 figure included damages.
In your words, how much will the ensuing fraud, identity theft, and spam cost me?
1. O'Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc (2013): So far as I can tell, they settled for $20M, but the settlement allowed uber to continue classifying drivers as contractors. You might be able to spin this as how uber is above the law or whatever, but the alternate take is that the drivers had a weak case, and were settling for whatever they could get. Not the best case to argue that companies are fined too little.
2. New York AG vs Uber: it seems like the settlement was two parts: a cash payout for past drivers and additional benefits to drivers going forward. Digging deeper into the settlement, it looks like for the former like uber's crime was improperly deducting sales taxes and black car fees[1], rather than failing to pay benefits. It doesn't look like uber got fined at all for not providing benefits. Again, you can frame this as uber being so above the law that they got fined $0 (!), but the argument from above applies. Maybe the NY AG had a weak case. Clearly they're willing to fine uber for something as vague as improper sales tax deductions, so why didn't they go for damages for uber not paying benefits?
[1] https://ubernyagsettlement.com/Portals/0/Document%20Files/NY...
In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined. eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767461
Maybe all of this basically cashes out to "the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change" to you, but to me this looks like a functioning legal system where defendants actually have a fair chance of winning.
Not always! lawyers representing classes in class actions don't always negotiate as hard as they could or should during settlements. You're probably familiar with federal judge Lucy Koh's prominent cases.
Not really understanding your argument that everything is fine, and there's nothing to see here.
Is that why Apple, Google and Meta ship a billion dollars every few years to the EU Cour of Justice?
That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though.
We don't know if that was due to legal departments or other factors, so claiming it was due to legal departments seems more like hope/wishing/assuming rather than actual knowledge. :(
What relevance does their plausible earnings via the offense have to the fine for the offense?
The harm suffered by the people whose privacy was violated is still there regardless of how much money was made through the violation.
Ubercab. Later sued and changed to Uber.
Now, too big to fail.
Basically is illegal unlicensed uninsured scam cab company.
Everyone benefits from the class being manageable (except maybe the plaintiffs' attorneys, who just want the biggest class they can possibly find).
What's the difference between a class of 20M and one of 200M? 99.98% of them aren't being surveyed for specific grievances, they're ticking a box on a letter or on a website. Let's not pretend that they're all getting surveyed for their desired outcome.
Same with "right deny to repair" - obviously anti-legal.
Stupidity can't win forever.
I've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc.
So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)
The fact that there's so many social norms about not snitching is a beautiful illustration of how disconnected the rules we live under are disconnected from our own interests.
Also, amazon straight up steals successful products from 3rd party sellers, rebrands them as Amazon basics, and then undercuts until the 3rd party seller goes out of business
What can they say, that "20% off your cart" coupons are prohibited anywhere else the product is listed? That's not feasible. You see North Face doing the same thing with sports retailers. Their jackets never go on sale, but retailers make cart-wide promotions available so you can still get the discount.
Republic of Tea blackberry sage tea, 50 count - $11 on their site, $13 on Amazon with Republic of Tea as the seller.
https://www.republicoftea.com/blackberry-sage-black/p/v00590...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0024SDYLI
And that's not really a super obscure product, since it's ranked #69 best selling for the "black tea" category.
In my Prime account, 90 percent of my reviews are positive, but because I've left several scathing, unapologetic negative reviews for products that shouldn't exist, all my reviews are now placed in eternal limbo. None of my reviews ever actually post.
For the reviews that posted, three months later when the product stops working, Amazon prohibits me from updating the original review. The FTC is well aware of this too.
Keep this in mind when evaluating a product using reviews as a metric. And further note the egregious usurpation of the review content search function being replaced by Rufus, the world's foremost most worthless heap of artificially generated product deception.
Amazon is indefensibly sinister.
At least they have some small fragment of decency in highlighting the Vine reviews. In green.
LOL, they literally have a giant data center at their disposal and some of the best automation geniuses in the world.
Class actions work by grouping many plaintiffs who have been harmed in the same way and whose damages if they win can be addressed in the same way (e.g., everyone gets a fixed amount of money, or a fixed percentage of what they spent, or something like that).
Then the cases of a small number of representatives of the class can be addressed at the actual trial, and the outcome applied to the whole class.
The larger the proposed class the more likely the variation in the harms to the members and in how to redress those harms, which can mean you need a larger number of representatives of the class at the actual trial.
Get large enough and it becomes difficult for the court to manage. In that case the class needs to be shrunk down to a set of plaintiffs with more uniform harms that can be addressed more uniformly. The people removed from the class might form another class or classes for separate suits, or sue as individuals, or some mixture of those options.
...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
The only people that benefit here are the lawyers on both sides.
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...
Nordic countries have similar representation to the U.S. in the early 1800s.
Though virtual, Colonial Americans had better representation in Parliament.
Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
You are leveraging their infrastructure for that transaction and sale, they are free to set the rules there. They do not otherwise charge you for the infrastructure costs related to purchasing the game, supplying continued redownload, supplying update infrastructure and so on.
You can otherwise take your game and sell it on the Epic store or GOG or run your own download infrastructure and foot the thousands in bandwidth bills. And charge whatever you want