Strong recommendation to listen to this podcast (season 1 of it): https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dream https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dream They discuss

Strong recommendation to listen to this podcast (season 1 of it): https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dream https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-dream They discuss exactly this question in a lot of detail. The FTC had started to go after some early MLMs, but then strong lobbying and political connections created a situation where you could have a "legal MLM" by following some rules, and the rules were basically written by Amway.