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> Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon lin

> Now suppose that you do that and I do that. You put up your blog, I put up a blog as well. But I also put out a browser extension that rewrites all amazon links to come to my site, record that, and then redirect. How is Amazon supposed to find out that your traffic is real and mine is from a scam? How about: affiliate links are constructed to incorporate the affiliate tag so that they can't be rewritten. Yes, each link on your blog is different than the links on my blog for the same items, not just slapping a tag in a URL field. Of course, this would have engineering and hardware overhead on Amazon's side, but without something like this they're just retreading telco history in giving the world untraceable Caller ID, as you aptly illustrate.

btilly 6y ago
You have downgraded my attack from "rewrite all Amazon links" to "rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate." And I can rewrite all Amazon links that were not owned by another affiliate if I don't mind just sending them to the Amazon home page. Which will probably be the behavior if an affiliate messes up the link (which they will do fairly reliably). The result is not a significant improvement over the current state, except that it becomes somewhat harder to be an affiliate.
- rhizome 6y ago
  My solution eliminates the entire theft problem, and I'm not going to entertain the nirvana fallacy of "oh but unaffiliated urls can still be rewritten!" which is also goalpost-moving. Why would Amazon honor a broken affiliate link? They don't now.