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Why do you need the strong institution to be a government? Why can't Amazon itself be that strong institution out of emergent market demand that it start doing
by geofft 8y ago
Why do you need the strong institution to be a government? Why can't Amazon itself be that strong institution out of emergent market demand that it start doing that?
(I guess another way of phrasing this is, Amazon is notoriously bad at removing poor-quality or counterfeit products from their storefront. How have they nonetheless become one of the most successful marketplaces? Is this a sign that the market doesn't actually care as much as we think they ought to? Or that they do care, but market mechanisms are ineffective at expressing this desire and so government regulation actually is needed?)
- freeone3000 8y agoThere's a really strong in-built faith people have that if you buy something, it's essentially non-harmful, and functions at least marginally for its intended purpose. This is actually part of US law (US Commercial Code Art. 2) (which is where we get that BSD license final clause from) - if this warranty isn't explicitly disclaimed, I think most people would assume the products they're receiving are genuine, of at least passable quality, and not actively toxic. Amazon isn't enforcing any of these on its sellers, thereby taking advantage of a huge amount of trust in the system - either the trust is going to be lost, at great detriment to goods markets as a whole, or someone needs to step in to enforce these statutes, since Amazon is unwilling to do it themselves.