13 ms·

Proposed Bill to Outlaw Bots from Scalping Online Goods [pdf]

49 points by runnerup 5y ago

Animats 5y ago
Is there any real difference between a 'bot and a corporation? If you hired people to scalp items, would this bill allow that? If so, what's the point?
- wpietri 5y ago
  Basically it's the same reason to outlaw robocalling specifically. The point is to raise costs to bad actors enough that some (and hopefully many) get out of the game.
- tacLog 5y ago
  I think there is still a point. Lets think about this from a scalpers perspective. I want to make as much money as possible. I know there will always be a market for products people can't get on the traditional market. I can clearly identify these ahead of time and spend thousands buying them. If when I use automated bots to buy, my products then become illegal's aka 'slightly harder' to sell. That might reduce my income. If I then have to employ people to click the same buttons as normal people click using the same software normal people use, and not circumventing order limits or 1 per person rules. That means I can't get products as easily or cheaply and reduces my profit. I see two solutions to scalpers. Incentivize or require a demand based market. So that prices shoot way up on their own. (bad for many reasons) or cut into profit margins and restrict overall volume of the people that will create that demand based market legally or illegibly.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  I could write up code in a day to take the place of a million humans, plenty of people could. That’s the difference.
0des 5y ago
I sometimes watch 'drops' from a few brands, and it's jaw dropping how fast some of the items disappear, and I'd always wonder if there were bots that make organized efforts to buy these items for resale. Even things like keychains sell out in moments, and pop up in secondary markets almost as fast.
- mtnGoat 5y ago
  yes there are bots just for this. brands like Nike and Supreme have big problems with this. Some arent even bots they are just people with a browser open, hoping to buying to resell/flip. its made easier by the fact that so many websites use the same ecommerce platforms which makes one bot work across thousands of sites.
  - rdtwo 5y ago
    Footlocker, Yeezy supply and Kith are basically designed for bots. It’s impossible to manually get hot items from any of the sites without tools.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Yes https://whop.com/ https://whop.com/ very affordable and accessible to everyone
_whiteCaps_ 5y ago
It's amazing how many places these bots show up where you wouldn't expect. Here in Vancouver, they've been used for grabbing campsites at the provincial parks.
- tyingq 5y ago
  Yeah. They are especially bad around things where you can hold inventory with no penalty for canceling later. Which ends up in a lot of "Why can't we have nice things?" rules later.
  - cphoover 5y ago
    why not use captcha?
lghh 5y ago
Scalping is just meeting an ineffeciency in supply and demand. I don't know why we feel the need to regulate one of the basic principles of a market. If you truly want to stop scalping, you should become more comfortable with dramatically increased MSRP and remove competitive moats around certain products. Nintendo should be able to sell the NES Classic for 13k if they want. I should be able to produce my own home-console that plays 20 year old games if I want. Those are the actual solutions to scalping.
- nojito 5y ago
  Scalping increases MSRP. Removing it would cause it to decrease.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    The only reason scaplers exist is because people are willing to pay a higher price than what the scalper pays for the good. The fact that people are willing to pay the higher price shows it was priced too low.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      It does not show that at all. Taking Nintendo as mentioned above, they have plenty of reason to aim for a stable, low price. The economics of their business are different than somebody, say, selling their labor by the hour. If they maximize per-console profit, they end up screwing themselves by creating a platform without many users, which is then unattractive to both game-makers and game-purchasers.
      - lghh 5y ago
        They are not selling less units for a higher price, they are selling the same number of units for a higher price.
        wpietri 5y ago
        So?
cgb223 5y ago
If bots are hosted in China (or any non-US country), and purchase products to be delivered to China does this law prevent any scalping of product at all in that case? If so, how is it enforced?
- Broken_Hippo 5y ago
  I wondered the same - I mean, we've all seen the effectiveness of anti-robocall legislation. All folks will really have to do is avoid using the bot inside the US. It will just wind up being a bill to show that "we have done things! We passed the bill!"
- tyingq 5y ago
  I would guess the shipping costs would keep a lot of that (though not all of it) in line. It did used to be a big issue when the UPU subsidized shipping from China, but that's gone now.
- kube-system 5y ago
  Many of the US big box sites where bots are a problem don't ship to China... or even Canada.
tacLog 5y ago
Side thought after reading this. Is there anyway to currently get a feed of high quality summarizations of laws passed by each congress? By that I mean, as a voting citizen I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details. I want the why, high level what does this change, and high level what was the opposition to this. I feel like one of the things that we struggle with is 'uninformed voters' in a modern democracy. I try to stay informed but I need to cut off my time somewhere. Are there any ways for me to stay lightly informed with low effort on my part?
- stevesearer 5y ago
  More basic than summaries, in my city there is no way to easily view how an individual city council member voted any any particular motion before them. Or even to see a list of the things the council has voted on. In order to see this information you need to wade through big PDFs versions of the council meeting minutes to find the motions. They are also backlogged by over a year in creating and publishing the minutes.
- kovek 5y ago
  If only we could use software to query the text of the bills.
  - tacLog 5y ago
    I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits. But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.
    - mbreese 5y ago
      It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law. But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.
mdasen 5y ago
The thing I never really understand about scalping is why the original retailer/supplier wouldn't simply raise their prices. If graphics cards are consistently out of stock, why not simply raise prices? We're seeing that with cars as many dealerships raise prices on their inventory rather than letting people buy them at MSRP and then re-sell them for a profit. If you're selling the items, why would you want to give that profit to scalpers? Is the issue that the seller doesn't know that demand so far exceeds supply? With something like Tickle Me Elmo, one could assume that they didn't know in advance, but could have quickly changed the price from $20 to $80 and dampened demand as the season went on. Could sites potentially predict demand by having some pre-registration for product sales and then predict the price better based on that? For products that are going to "drop", it could be beneficial to consumers (at least ones that have money) and sellers to have that. As one collects data, one could start predicting what price would leave you without too many scalpers based on pre-registration numbers. Maybe the issue is that many things might be more winner-take-most or winner-take-momentum/word-of-mouth/hype markets. If everyone saw Tickle Me Elmo at $80, some other toy would get all the hype as the hot-item of the year and they wouldn't sell any. Still, for something like graphics cards, that seems less likely to be the case. People don't buy graphics cards because it's a hot item. They buy them for practical purposes. I guess one could argue that if certain crypto markets saw graphics cards as having higher prices long-term, they might try and migrate off graphics cards which could lower the demand long-term, but it seems like graphics card companies are more interested in serving gamers. It's just always seemed odd that sellers would allow people to arbitrage their pricing like that - especially on known hot items.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  In the case of a band, openly pricing out a bunch of your loyal fans isn't a great idea.
- hattmall 5y ago
  Manufacturer sells to distributor who sells to retail. Retail is constrained by pricing agreements. They can't sell at a higher price because the manufacturer directs the retail price. Scalpers are really just improving market place efficiency, but manufacturers know that demand is variable so they don't want to strictly limit products to the wealthiest consumers because there is plenty of data that doing so slows wider adoption. It's all about marketing and we know that right now affordability and limited quantity is an ideal mix.
Shadonototra 5y ago
what about a bill to not be able to sell something over MSRP outlawing bots IS IMPOSSIBLE, you can spit what ever text article, it won't stop someone from automating things even more the only that that's gonna do is make them even harder to detect ;) bots creators don't burn all their cards whey they do automation
- _boffin_ 5y ago
  The "S" in MSRP is "Suggested"... maybe you'd like "MRRP" or Manufacture Required Retail Price, which some places do have contractual obligations for.
ShakataGaNai 5y ago
This is a great idea in concept, but sadly I don't think it'll ever work. Most etailers spend good money trying to prevent these type of bots. There are dozens of players in the anti-bot space. Unfortunately it doesn't stop the most dedicated attackers. And this is a cat and mouse game that can evolve at the speed of technology. A game that evolves at the speed of law will be out of date before it's even made it out of the draft stage. Even if a law is written so well that there isn't a single loophole (which will never happen)... all the scalpers need to do is operate in a different country. Between botnets, proxies, re-shippers and other middle-men groups... you aren't going to stop it through the law.
- fhood 5y ago
  It might not work well for digital goods, but physical ones are much easier to control. Edit: and even for digital goods, it would force people away from the most convenient storefronts.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  This will just consolidate botting to criminal organizations. I think that’s bad for everyone
riffic 5y ago
not a lawyer but I have a feeling there are constitutional hurdles here to consider.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  Such as? The Commerce Clause has been interpreted extremely loosely in recent decades. If you can ban medical marijuana because it might travel across state lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich), you can ban scalping on similar grounds.
  - riffic 5y ago
    by "I have a feeling", it means I don't really know. I qualified this by saying I'm not a lawyer. I'll just go out on a limb and say first amendment reasons? It's kind of hand-wavy, but it's pretty broad and I can appreciate that it's applicable for so many forms of protection (do you like those t-shirts printed with illegal source code? I don't know. Don't ask me for analysis here.)
darepublic 5y ago
I'd hope using a personal bot to buy online goods (ie for convenience) is still lawful
woah 5y ago
This is a good first step, but ultimately it's nothing but a band-aid. We need to make it illegal for toy manufacturers to negligently mis-plan for the holidays, leaving millions of children disappointed. If it is found that a toy manufacturer could have produced more stock, but failed to, through malice or incompetence, they should be fined at the very least.
- fhood 5y ago
  I can't think of too many downsides to making bot scalping illegal, making it illegal to misunderstand demand seems more fraught......unless this is sarcasm.
- savant_penguin 5y ago
  This sounds extremely dystopian A simple underproduction (due to waste/risk avoidance or mere strategy) would create more litigation. Which companies do you think can afford this kind of regulation? The mom and pop shop or Walmart? Even if you ignore all of that, failure to sell enough sounds like a bizarre reason for a fine and would push the moral expectations of the law everyone has (murder, theft, violence except in self defense) even farther from the actual law of the land. To give you one example of such type of law, look at the subsidies the US taxpayers provide to billionaire sugar producers. You could easily argue that one of the most diabetic countries on the planet should not subsidize sugar, yet it still happens. These types of action lead me (and I expect others) to have a much lower respect for authority and the law
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

49 points by runnerup 5y ago

Is there any real difference between a 'bot and a corporation? If you hired people to scalp items, would this bill allow that? If so, what's the point?

wpietri 5y ago
Basically it's the same reason to outlaw robocalling specifically. The point is to raise costs to bad actors enough that some (and hopefully many) get out of the game.
tacLog 5y ago
I think there is still a point. Lets think about this from a scalpers perspective. I want to make as much money as possible. I know there will always be a market for products people can't get on the traditional market. I can clearly identify these ahead of time and spend thousands buying them. If when I use automated bots to buy, my products then become illegal's aka 'slightly harder' to sell. That might reduce my income. If I then have to employ people to click the same buttons as normal people click using the same software normal people use, and not circumventing order limits or 1 per person rules. That means I can't get products as easily or cheaply and reduces my profit. I see two solutions to scalpers. Incentivize or require a demand based market. So that prices shoot way up on their own. (bad for many reasons) or cut into profit margins and restrict overall volume of the people that will create that demand based market legally or illegibly.
colechristensen 5y ago
I could write up code in a day to take the place of a million humans, plenty of people could. That’s the difference.

0des 5y ago

I sometimes watch 'drops' from a few brands, and it's jaw dropping how fast some of the items disappear, and I'd always wonder if there were bots that make organized efforts to buy these items for resale. Even things like keychains sell out in moments, and pop up in secondary markets almost as fast.

mtnGoat 5y ago
yes there are bots just for this. brands like Nike and Supreme have big problems with this. Some arent even bots they are just people with a browser open, hoping to buying to resell/flip. its made easier by the fact that so many websites use the same ecommerce platforms which makes one bot work across thousands of sites.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Footlocker, Yeezy supply and Kith are basically designed for bots. It’s impossible to manually get hot items from any of the sites without tools.
rdtwo 5y ago
Yes https://whop.com/ https://whop.com/ very affordable and accessible to everyone

_whiteCaps_ 5y ago

It's amazing how many places these bots show up where you wouldn't expect. Here in Vancouver, they've been used for grabbing campsites at the provincial parks.

tyingq 5y ago
Yeah. They are especially bad around things where you can hold inventory with no penalty for canceling later. Which ends up in a lot of "Why can't we have nice things?" rules later.
- cphoover 5y ago
  why not use captcha?

lghh 5y ago

Scalping is just meeting an ineffeciency in supply and demand. I don't know why we feel the need to regulate one of the basic principles of a market. If you truly want to stop scalping, you should become more comfortable with dramatically increased MSRP and remove competitive moats around certain products. Nintendo should be able to sell the NES Classic for 13k if they want. I should be able to produce my own home-console that plays 20 year old games if I want. Those are the actual solutions to scalping.

nojito 5y ago
Scalping increases MSRP. Removing it would cause it to decrease.
- xboxnolifes 5y ago
  The only reason scaplers exist is because people are willing to pay a higher price than what the scalper pays for the good. The fact that people are willing to pay the higher price shows it was priced too low.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    It does not show that at all. Taking Nintendo as mentioned above, they have plenty of reason to aim for a stable, low price. The economics of their business are different than somebody, say, selling their labor by the hour. If they maximize per-console profit, they end up screwing themselves by creating a platform without many users, which is then unattractive to both game-makers and game-purchasers.
    - lghh 5y ago
      They are not selling less units for a higher price, they are selling the same number of units for a higher price.
      - wpietri 5y ago
        So?

cgb223 5y ago

If bots are hosted in China (or any non-US country), and purchase products to be delivered to China does this law prevent any scalping of product at all in that case? If so, how is it enforced?

Broken_Hippo 5y ago
I wondered the same - I mean, we've all seen the effectiveness of anti-robocall legislation. All folks will really have to do is avoid using the bot inside the US. It will just wind up being a bill to show that "we have done things! We passed the bill!"
tyingq 5y ago
I would guess the shipping costs would keep a lot of that (though not all of it) in line. It did used to be a big issue when the UPU subsidized shipping from China, but that's gone now.
kube-system 5y ago
Many of the US big box sites where bots are a problem don't ship to China... or even Canada.

tacLog 5y ago

Side thought after reading this. Is there anyway to currently get a feed of high quality summarizations of laws passed by each congress? By that I mean, as a voting citizen I want to watch what congresses law/executive orders do. I don't want to read the laws, or how they work, or any of the details. I want the why, high level what does this change, and high level what was the opposition to this. I feel like one of the things that we struggle with is 'uninformed voters' in a modern democracy. I try to stay informed but I need to cut off my time somewhere. Are there any ways for me to stay lightly informed with low effort on my part?

stevesearer 5y ago
More basic than summaries, in my city there is no way to easily view how an individual city council member voted any any particular motion before them. Or even to see a list of the things the council has voted on. In order to see this information you need to wade through big PDFs versions of the council meeting minutes to find the motions. They are also backlogged by over a year in creating and publishing the minutes.
kovek 5y ago
If only we could use software to query the text of the bills.
- tacLog 5y ago
  I can't tell if your joking or not, but wouldn't summarization at that level require some pretty insane AI? The closest I have seen is pretty decent and runs on some of the reddit news subreddits. But it is far from the work of a person skilled in real summarization, because real summarization requires you to predict what I care about based on the world at large.
  - mbreese 5y ago
    It's not so much summarizing the text of bills, but having an API to query just the text of bills would be really nice. Even better would be some kind of diff/git blame log of changes. I would love to know who voted for which amendments, or how a particular bit of text got into a law. But, realistically, that would never happen as it's not information that I think people would be comfortable providing.

mdasen 5y ago

The thing I never really understand about scalping is why the original retailer/supplier wouldn't simply raise their prices. If graphics cards are consistently out of stock, why not simply raise prices? We're seeing that with cars as many dealerships raise prices on their inventory rather than letting people buy them at MSRP and then re-sell them for a profit. If you're selling the items, why would you want to give that profit to scalpers? Is the issue that the seller doesn't know that demand so far exceeds supply? With something like Tickle Me Elmo, one could assume that they didn't know in advance, but could have quickly changed the price from $20 to $80 and dampened demand as the season went on. Could sites potentially predict demand by having some pre-registration for product sales and then predict the price better based on that? For products that are going to "drop", it could be beneficial to consumers (at least ones that have money) and sellers to have that. As one collects data, one could start predicting what price would leave you without too many scalpers based on pre-registration numbers. Maybe the issue is that many things might be more winner-take-most or winner-take-momentum/word-of-mouth/hype markets. If everyone saw Tickle Me Elmo at $80, some other toy would get all the hype as the hot-item of the year and they wouldn't sell any. Still, for something like graphics cards, that seems less likely to be the case. People don't buy graphics cards because it's a hot item. They buy them for practical purposes. I guess one could argue that if certain crypto markets saw graphics cards as having higher prices long-term, they might try and migrate off graphics cards which could lower the demand long-term, but it seems like graphics card companies are more interested in serving gamers. It's just always seemed odd that sellers would allow people to arbitrage their pricing like that - especially on known hot items.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ceejayoz 5y ago
In the case of a band, openly pricing out a bunch of your loyal fans isn't a great idea.
hattmall 5y ago
Manufacturer sells to distributor who sells to retail. Retail is constrained by pricing agreements. They can't sell at a higher price because the manufacturer directs the retail price. Scalpers are really just improving market place efficiency, but manufacturers know that demand is variable so they don't want to strictly limit products to the wealthiest consumers because there is plenty of data that doing so slows wider adoption. It's all about marketing and we know that right now affordability and limited quantity is an ideal mix.

Shadonototra 5y ago

what about a bill to not be able to sell something over MSRP outlawing bots IS IMPOSSIBLE, you can spit what ever text article, it won't stop someone from automating things even more the only that that's gonna do is make them even harder to detect ;) bots creators don't burn all their cards whey they do automation

_boffin_ 5y ago
The "S" in MSRP is "Suggested"... maybe you'd like "MRRP" or Manufacture Required Retail Price, which some places do have contractual obligations for.

ShakataGaNai 5y ago

This is a great idea in concept, but sadly I don't think it'll ever work. Most etailers spend good money trying to prevent these type of bots. There are dozens of players in the anti-bot space. Unfortunately it doesn't stop the most dedicated attackers. And this is a cat and mouse game that can evolve at the speed of technology. A game that evolves at the speed of law will be out of date before it's even made it out of the draft stage. Even if a law is written so well that there isn't a single loophole (which will never happen)... all the scalpers need to do is operate in a different country. Between botnets, proxies, re-shippers and other middle-men groups... you aren't going to stop it through the law.

fhood 5y ago
It might not work well for digital goods, but physical ones are much easier to control. Edit: and even for digital goods, it would force people away from the most convenient storefronts.
rdtwo 5y ago
This will just consolidate botting to criminal organizations. I think that’s bad for everyone

riffic 5y ago

not a lawyer but I have a feeling there are constitutional hurdles here to consider.

ceejayoz 5y ago
Such as? The Commerce Clause has been interpreted extremely loosely in recent decades. If you can ban medical marijuana because it might travel across state lines (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich), you can ban scalping on similar grounds.
- riffic 5y ago
  by "I have a feeling", it means I don't really know. I qualified this by saying I'm not a lawyer. I'll just go out on a limb and say first amendment reasons? It's kind of hand-wavy, but it's pretty broad and I can appreciate that it's applicable for so many forms of protection (do you like those t-shirts printed with illegal source code? I don't know. Don't ask me for analysis here.)

darepublic 5y ago

I'd hope using a personal bot to buy online goods (ie for convenience) is still lawful

woah 5y ago

This is a good first step, but ultimately it's nothing but a band-aid. We need to make it illegal for toy manufacturers to negligently mis-plan for the holidays, leaving millions of children disappointed. If it is found that a toy manufacturer could have produced more stock, but failed to, through malice or incompetence, they should be fined at the very least.

fhood 5y ago
I can't think of too many downsides to making bot scalping illegal, making it illegal to misunderstand demand seems more fraught......unless this is sarcasm.
savant_penguin 5y ago
This sounds extremely dystopian A simple underproduction (due to waste/risk avoidance or mere strategy) would create more litigation. Which companies do you think can afford this kind of regulation? The mom and pop shop or Walmart? Even if you ignore all of that, failure to sell enough sounds like a bizarre reason for a fine and would push the moral expectations of the law everyone has (murder, theft, violence except in self defense) even farther from the actual law of the land. To give you one example of such type of law, look at the subsidies the US taxpayers provide to billionaire sugar producers. You could easily argue that one of the most diabetic countries on the planet should not subsidize sugar, yet it still happens. These types of action lead me (and I expect others) to have a much lower respect for authority and the law

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]