EU fines Temu €200M for allowing sale of illegal products

https://youtu.be/B90_SNNbcoU

Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.

The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.

In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].

The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.

[0] https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1858/05/13/785...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Washington_Wiley

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pure_Food_and_Drug_Act

.. which are of course the easiest thing to fake.

> then overpriced incumbents use their influence over the laws to target any new supplier that tries to establish a trusted brand, which causes the foreign suppliers to have to sell through dozens of unknown labels so they can continue to dissolve them if any of them get prosecuted.

This is not an accurate description of new market entry for .. well, anything? And what are the new entrants being prosecuted for? Is it by any chance unsafe products?

I can't name a single executive that was jailed over this period here in France. Yet if the law was applied justly thousands of executives and engineers would rot in jail and the world would arguably be a much better place because it would provide incentives for companies to actually behave and not destroy our planet and livelihoods. So are companies really taking responsibility for the lives they destroy? Not so sure.

Edit: Reply to lozenge as I am still rate-limited by HN. Some of them get recalled, the vast majority of them are still being sold and could burn your house down.

The problem being that a marketplace platform with millions of small sellers has no reasonable way to do this either.

because people now assume if you can buy it, it’s safe,

because their responsibility has been relieved of them.

but, you’re only going to achieve moving the cheapo builders stateside where they’re easier to enforce on.

That race to the bottom isn’t going anywhere - if someone can save a grand half-heartedly wrapping their own packs, they’re going to.

I’ll do whatever reading, and due diligence keeps my family safe.

I’ll abstain from things until I’m sure.

Others might choose the same.

They range in size from small shops to things with huge floor space.

One thing I've found is that they seem to sell very low quality stuff: e.g. on aliexpress you can buy a flashlight which is built out of metal, has usb-c charging, for $10, whereas in the physical shop, you get the plastic one that takes AA batteries for $2. So they're not a replacement for AliExpress, Temu & co.

Anything that unpredictably dumps large amounts of kinetic energy on failure is one of those.

I had a buddy that bought the tool for getting car suspension springs on from Harbor Freight, and I definitely wouldn't roll those dice.

it’s a problem of allowing the collapse of your own civilization?

How does that not add any value?

Temu is free to take the same responsibility, but they don't.

Temu is just deliberately ignoring any rules.

Not to mention, new parents are often some of the most sleep deprived. The burden should be on the manufacturer to make these safe. And it's not even that hard: just use one of the clasps on the battery compartment that requires a coin or key to open rather than just your fingernails.

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/andro...

Edit: I should add that Pinduoduo also ended up being fined over $200 million after a couple fist fight with auditing officials in China [1]. Stay safe, EU folks.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-11/fistfight...

They get stuff that the factories can't sell for any reason and just shove them out the country as cheaply as possible.

I'd sooner give Argos the money, they aren't that much more expensive (if at all) for the common set of things they sell and I can walk and pick it up same day.

They broke the first rule of e-commerce - "Don't make the customer think".

Both of your arguments are "but it's this slightly different part of government that's responsible: see it was X, not Y".

Ok fine, you're right but that doesn't refute what I said. Obviously people look at the effect of what government does as a whole. The net effect of what the entire government did was letting a LOT of companies get away with a lot of crimes, to the point of bankrupting a great deal of European businesses.

1) we all know it would only take a single one

2) they didn't do this for 20 years

In all seriousness. Does ANYONE believe that the EU commission/parliament did not know about this (despite millions of complaints) and only now discovered the problem? Is that seriously your point?

Or is it somewhat more believable that they did this with the express purpose of destroying local industry and the change is happening now because we have "Mercosur" causing the same issue, but moving from China to South America.

1) they are NOT laws. Despite what's published everywhere you get zero legal rights from the GPDR. A legal right is some right you have, and if someone violates that right you can ask a court to intervene. With the GPDR, there is no such right. No court will help you under the GPDR.

The executives of member state governments (and ~40 "international organizations", most famously Interpol) have the right to enforce GPDR. You can only complain to these new, totally separate from any other enforcement mechanism (ie. they're not police) organizations. And they, of course, generally don't listen.

If you go check the complaints lists are full of people complaining that their medical files were leaked by hospitals (because private doctors are in revolt to the GPDR) to various other government organizations, with very large consequences. For instance medical files being used to decide on insurance status, immigration status, unemployment/long term illness status, and family law status. There is no reaction to this, even when it does violate the GPDR. And my next paragraph is why it generally doesn't.

Second, the executives of member state governments have the right NOT to enforce GPDR. Specifically, the executive has the right to grant exceptions to the GPDR to any organization they want (including transitively: allowing a government contractor not only violate the GPDR themselves but to allow anyone else they use to violate the GPDR. For example, this is the reason Google, Amazon and Microsoft have essentially all medical files of everyone in the EU, and Palantir has some 20%)

These exceptions are made transitively AND after-the-fact. Neither of which is legal, but the only one who can complain is the government itself.

2) It means there is no point for individuals to file GPDR complaints. Normally there is "1831", which is a legal principle which refers to a particular law. Essentially that if you damage someone else by violating the law, you are responsible for that damage (ie. you can be made to pay for them). This applies to essentially every EU law. But not GPDR (and also not to other famous EU laws like DMA)

To illustrate the common problem: you go to the hospital, because you took drugs. Maybe you're scared it'll have serious consequences, whatever. Now you go to your insurance ... and they will no longer cover your treatment for heart arythmia. "It's your own fault, because you did drugs". Now what happened is that the hospital updated your medical file, and sent it to the government. Medical insurance is national, so they have access to medical files. Of course, it is a VERY serious GPDR violation that the information leaked, and with any other law this would mean that a judge will convict the hospital to pay for what you lost, say in this case, they would be forced to pay, WITHOUT the insurance covering it, your heart treatment.

Not with the GPDR. Even if you get the government to go after it, and you get them convicted, you get nothing. Nor is the insurance forced to change their decision.

This is how most new EU law works. The crucial difference is that for essentially all these laws, the EU commission holds all the cards. They then use their position of power to negotiate and come to an understanding with all these organizations. That's how they work, how they've always worked.

And it's one more reason I'm very opposed to the EU. Europeans will THOROUGLY regret giving the commission this power, that's a certainty in my mind.

Specifically what the commission does is to give companies exceptions to these rules. For example, Teresa Ribera, as well as Ursula Von Der Leyen, personally (and without any parliament approval) have the right to extend Apple's exemption to the DMA (and thus Apple's 30% cut to all transactions involving an iPhone in the EU). Both were born rich (Ursula Von Der Leyen is a member of a noble family that has been very wealthy for at least 400 years. Notably, her family's wealth survived WW2 in Germany ...) How is such enormous power in the hands of individuals used? Well, look up how and why a communist served for 8 years as the chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

1. It's not, and

2. Who cares if somebody gets fired for PR purposes? Especially with a severance that will make sure that their great-grandchildren will never have to work and your great-grandchildren will be paying them rent?

Everybody doing tens of billions of $ of business shrugs off a $200M fine. They might even get a bonus and a plaque for coming up with a scam that lasted so long before it blew up.

There’s zero demand for products that are hiding safety issues that nobody was seeking out (e.g., toys with lead paint, batteries that explode)

Demand for illegal things isn’t in a vacuum. It’s hard to enact prohibition on alcohol or cannabis (extremely easy to produce) versus prohibiting something more complicated to make, difficult to smuggle, or less desirable to buy.

If my government bans Crocs am I going to go through the engineering effort to make them myself? Plus, if I go outside the cops will see my illegal Crocs very quickly. I have plenty of alternatives to Crocs and most of them are better. Most likely, I won’t even think about the ban.

We have a good example with incandescent light bulbs. I don’t know anyone who has attempted to violate the ban on home incandescent light bulbs.

The whole “everything should be legal anyway because there will always be a black market” philosophy is not a universal truth and we need to stop assuming that it makes sense.