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Comment by egeozcan | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine received a double shipment for a $300 order. Being honest, he contacted customer service to arrange a return. Everything seemed fine until a few days later when he noticed they had also refunded his original payment. He reached out again to let them know, and they said they’d just recharge his card. Apparently, that transaction failed (no clear reason why), and without any warning, they banned his account, wiping out his entire Kindle library in the process. Amazon works wonderfully right up until it fails spectacularly.

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I wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.

Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.

I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)

I hope it works better than the EU DSA dispute resolution, which I've heard multiple accounts of youtube just ignoring.

Haha, let me guess, if they're based in Ireland then this enforcement is up to Ireland as well, so it's as toothless as the other digital laws?

Some kind of court, for small claims?

We could call it "small claims court".

Just need to outlaw binding arbitration

Amazon will reimburse arbitration fees if you win making it a cheaper option for consumers than small claims court.

"If".

[Edit, because one-word replies are uncivilized: one reason to be suspicious about binding arbitration is that the company against whom you'll be pleading is a repeat customer of that arbitration service. It's a non-transparent / non-public process, so it's hard to have confidence is fair, and over which we (ie, the public) have no influence if it were not.]

>is a repeat customer of that arbitration service

Who is locked in by the contract. The arbitration company gets their fees no matter the outcome.

>so it's hard to have confidence is fair

You can appeal to a court if it's unfair.

"We examine whether firms have an informational advantage in selecting arbitrators in consumer arbitration [...] We first document that some arbitrators are systematically industry friendly while others are consumer friendly. Firms appear to utilize this information in the arbitrator selection process. Despite a randomly generated list of potential arbitrators, industry-friendly arbitrators are forty percent more likely to be selected than their consumer friendly counterparts. Better informed firms and consumers choose more favorable arbitrators. [...] Competition between arbitrators exacerbates the informational advantage of firms in equilibrium resulting in all arbitrators slanting towards being industry friendly. Evidence suggests that limiting the respondent’s and claimant’s inputs over the arbitrator selection process could significantly improve outcomes for consumers."

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers...

Businesses also incorporate in jurisdictions that are business friendly too.

Two problems with that argument: 1) Amazon would also have to reimburse small claims court fees if you win, and 2) arbitration is worse for the consumer in pretty much every other way.

It's 75 bucks in the EU without waiting for the reimbursement.

Does that include flying out to wherever?

That won't get you your account back.

Or maybe pass some laws with more penalties for defrauding your own customers.

The solution to authoritarian problems is to organize.

In this case, we're overdue for a service that we all pay into, like a collective credit card, that only continues making payments to companies like Amazon if all of the members are happy. When you get banned without due process, payments stop until the matter is resolved.

Also, the collective can bargain-down rates. If it senses price increases beyond inflation, it just sends the adjusted amount, like 95%, until the matter is resolved.

We need this collective bargaining for housing (like tenant unions), the workplace, politics, pharmaceuticals, etc. The scale of this is so large that the collective could exist beyond any specific industry. So that it would operate as a meta economy beside the so-called free market economy (late-stage capitalism) that we operate under today due to the lack of antitrust enforcement.

Groups like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) are working towards these sorts of goals on a number of fronts:

https://weall.org/

> there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally.

They are called courts and they exist.

Of course, companies like to require you to agree to binding arbitration, instead.

How would that work for countries where Amazon doesn't have a legal presence? A foreign court would be able to do anything.

Something similar happened to me with Blizzard. I'd buy subscription time and, a few days later, they'd cancel my subscription and refund the charge. After a few rounds of this, they suspended my account.

In that case, I appealed and was told, for the first time, that the reason for the refunds was that the card I'd been paying with didn't match the stored payment information saved to my account.

Both cards were equally valid and there was no indication anywhere that having saved payment information disqualified you from paying by any other method. As best I can tell, Blizzard just updated their policies one day for no particular reason, then made not complying with the new, secret policies a bannable offense.

i suspect the reason for such a policy is to ban fraud/stolen credit cards (probably used by professional bot farmers selling in-game gold for real life money).

The collateral damage on regular, innocent players is just an acceptable outcome.

I never bought any ebooks off Amazon without removing the drm at the time. I did buy a lot of shows and movies, but if they take those away, I'll just pirate them, given I've already paid.

Buying drm'ed shit, and removing later only indicates that DRM is acceptable.

Pirate it to start, and dont pay. You're an 'illegal' either way, with a tort copyright violation OR a criminal DMCA violation.

At the time a lot of the things I was reading were only available on there or on paper.

Unfortunately not everything is available on the high seas. For instance, it's impossible to find older seasons of MasterChef Australia (in HD). Heck even trying to view it legally, outside of AU, is a mission - Amazon is the only entity that has the older seasons. I ended up subscribing to a Prime account just for this.

Every season of MasterChef Australia is available on the right tracker.

What is the vpn of choice these days for bittorrent?

there's only one that's not extremely shady and has working port forwarding. If you don't need the latter, just stick to Mullvad.

What is the one with working port forwarding?

Proton, at least for me

PIA also supports port forwarding from non-US regions. And the Linux solution is better and provides a stable port, unlike Proton's 'run this command every 60 seconds and hope'.

I only use OpenVPN (another reason to move away from Mullvad), not their own clients. I moved away from PIA in the past, I don't remember why, it was a long time ago.

I was happy with Mullvad for a long time, especially being able to buy their scratch cards, but now I had to move to Proton due to the deprecation of port forwarding and openvpn at mullvad.

But PIA is american anyway so that won't work for me, I'm not signing up with new american services anymore since Trump came to power again.

Haven't found any, certainly not any with active seeders. If you know of a tracker (that doesn't require super special invites), I'm all ears.

S01-03 only exist in SD, from S04 onwards Full HD files are available on all trackers that I happen to have too.

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