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Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

reuters.com

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Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#61

Post by gruez »

tecleandor wrote: post #47
gruez wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Equifax: In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The company has agreed to a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories. The settlement includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the data breach. How much money did they make from the breach thou…

Fines should be higher than the cost avoided, or companies would just avoid the cost until get caught. 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 t…

>Fines should be higher than the cost avoided, or companies would just avoid the cost until get caught.

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?

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#62

Post by jazzyjackson »

crazygringo wrote: post #4

> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. 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…

I immediately just click the back button when some spin wheel discount thing pops up, I just figured it was temu leaking. Thank you for explaining why they are doing this, tho I still wonder why it has to be gamified and not just, click here for a coupon, is it because the agreement with Amazon precludes them from offering coupons, but neglects to forbid casino games?

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#64

Post by gruez »

justinclift wrote: post #59
gruez wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff. Of the cases they actually get sued for, there's enough complexity and genuine question of law that they can't straightforwardly prosecuted. There's a reason why basically all states had to pass bills to reclassify gig work companies, rather than winning slam dunk cases with years of back pay. In cases companies megacor…

> to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though.

Again, you don't see the illegal behavior that they didn't try. For instance, Uber probably could have nabbed more market share by allowing drivers to pick people up off the streets as well, but that would obviously break taxi medallion laws. Uber worked within the pre-booked ride service loophole. Same goes for contractor classification. They probably could have gotten better customer satisfaction ratings if they prohibited drivers from using multiple apps, but that would obviously look bad for them if they wanted to argue drivers were contractors.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#65

Post by cjbgkagh »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #29
crazygringo wrote: post #4

> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. 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…

Neither here nor there, but about 15 years ago while I was a fresh grad/hire at Amazon, I realized that the crawler that was supposed to enforce this had not been running for multiple years. I went out and fixed it and got it running again, and I showed about $8M/month revenue increase from this. 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…

I made a BigCo $130M p.a. with a general improvement but was similarly denied a promotion. Changed my career plan after that and got out of there. These same companies complain constantly that it’s so hard to hire good people.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#66

Post by mikeryan »

solardev wrote: post #20
gruez wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at Amazon's filings, the argument they made is the following: >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 i…

I don't see the difference between what the lawyers are saying and the parent's summary of it. > 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 cer…

I mean there are technical legal issues in the size of a class. For example, any member of a class can object to any settlement agreement or any multiple groups of class members can object to a settlement making managing approval difficult.

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.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#67

Post by Spivak »

IncreasePosts wrote: post #50
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave to tell about that time you fixed the snitching machine. But I appreciate you telling it and I don't think you should get downvotes

If a machine catches you doing something you weren't supposed to do, it doesn't seem like snitching. Are red light cameras snitches?

Yes, what do you think snitching is? There's an automated security company called tattletale. That's what they do.

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.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#68

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

gruez wrote: post #18
p1necone wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this approach seems to fly all the time for large businesses. 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…

>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 say…

> or how much money they could have plausibly gained from the offenses in question

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.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#69

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

like_any_other wrote: post #6
giancarlostoro wrote: post #3

So what are we all looking at? $100 a piece? Lol "Have you used Amazon from the years x to y?" If it covers 2020 thats basically most Americans.

$100 each for 330 million Americans sums to $33 billion, which is about half of Amazon's yearly profit (the whole company, not just e-commerce). While I think it should be higher still (anti-competitive practices should be harshly punished), it's not negligible. The real point isn't in the consumer payout, but in discouraging these practices, so that a handful of companies don't get a chokehold on the market (one cou…

What percentage of affected users typically enroll in a class action lawsuit? I could believe anything from 1-90%.

Re: Amazon must face US nationwide class action over third-party sales

#70

Post by delfinom »

nosignono wrote: post #40

> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon. Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.

They do not. You are free to sell your game anywhere online for less. You simply cannot use the ability to generate steam keys to sell steam games externally and then proceed to undercut steam.

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

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