Amazon wants a product safety regulator declared unconstitutional
118 comments
·March 22, 2025ChuckMcM
jfengel
That just kinda follows from democracy. Principles are for voters. Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected). If they went back to first principles, and disagreed with their constituents, they'd lose.
The closest thing you get to principles are civil servants, who are hired for their domain expertise. But voters grumble because those civil servants aren't elected; they are basically self propagating by hiring their successors.
That actually used to kinda work. There was enough inertia to keep elections from making everything about people's moods, and enough input from Congress, SCOTUS, and POTUS to keep it competent.
But the mood has shifted to extreme distrust of those institutions. So they're getting wiped out in one fell swoop. There is a principle in place, but it's the principle that the government itself is irreparable.
WarOnPrivacy
> Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected).
There was a time when I thought this. Some observations cast strong doubt on it. Primarily:
how close congressional votes track with major campaign contributions and
the revolving door where major donors later reward officials who voted for their interests
thesuperbigfrog
I agree with you. In the United States, the Citizens United ruling (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC) basically legalized the corporate takeover of government and buyout of elected government officials in the name of free speech.
"Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected)."
should be:
"Elected officials do what corporate sponsors want and say that they are doing what voters want (as affirmed by getting campaign finance donations by corporate sponsors to help them get re-elected)."
> It's difficult to see how voters can compete with this, particularly while info about these routine arrangements rarely reaches voters.
Exactly. This puts elected government officials in the role of the Dungeons and Dragons Warlock class:
"Warlock patrons are powerful entities that grant mortals access to their power in exchange for a pact that binds the warlock to their patron's will." [1]
They serve at the pleasure of their patron which means they are not serving "we the people".
It is legalized corruption that puts profits and power above people and the good of the nation.
[1] https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-and-dragons-dnd-roleplay-w...
ChuckMcM
At some point I saw some material that purportedly computed "Voting Power" as a function of population scaled by economic demographics.
It defined someone with a full time job and the option to take some time off to vote on a Tuesday without economic cost a voting power of 1.0V (i.e. One Vote) and went on to define people with full time hourly job where it 'cost' them to vote as .85V, down to single caregivers and unhoused people at 0.5V. On the other side of the scale people in management as 2V (they influence people who work for them to vote like they do), senior leadership at 10V (they have "extra" money to fund additional campaign activities to drive votes), and above that 50V for people who aren't constrained by "work." I would guess billionaires would be 100V or something.
This was in response to a anti-gerrymandering legislation where defining a district to have more voting power for your party while still having an even distribution of individuals representing different parties. Pretty evil IMHO.
jfengel
Voters vote for free. If they want something different they can vote for it.
They can tell pollsters whatever they want. And what the candidates hear, and what I hear, is how they vote. If they're sending that politician back, then they can't disapprove all that much.
armada651
> Elected officials do what they think the voters want (as affirmed by getting re-elected).
Elected officials do what their corporate contributors want. They then convince a small minority of voters that that's what they want and then their party redraws voting districts to ensure that their votes have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of the next election.
rayiner
> The closest thing you get to principles are civil servants, who are hired for their domain expertise. But voters grumble because those civil servants aren't elected; they are basically self propagating by hiring their successors
It’s a principle-agent problem. Civil servants have principles and act on them, but they’re not necessarily the principles voters share.
faster
I recently started reading a great book called "Democracy for Realists". Voters may believe that they are electing someone who will represent their principles, but that is not how it works.
This is a good summary of the book: https://sppe.lse.ac.uk/articles/52
schoen
The review you linked to is pretty critical of the book. Do you have an opinion about its criticisms?
jltsiren
That's a property of democracy with very small districts. With larger districts (and proportional elections or something similar), it's enough that a few percent of the voters support you. Carving yourself a niche and sticking to it then becomes a viable strategy for re-election.
anon84873628
"Tyranny of the majority" and "paradox of tolerance" are both problems for Democracy. And solving for both creates a tension that is almost a paradox itself.
So elected officials also need to be able to manage their constituents, push back on the masses, and explain why compromise / commitment to values / etc are important in society. As you say, this requires some level of trust in officials which sadly has deteriorated.
spiderfarmer
Even if you’re deluded to the point where you’re convinced government can’t work, what is your end game? People who can only criticize never offer solutions, but are always happy to profit from the work of others. Like Ayn Rand who was dependent on social security handouts. Even if you drive over roads that were built because of government programs, you’re a hypocritical profiteer in my book.
photonthug
> Even if you drive over roads that were built because of government programs, you’re a hypocritical profiteer in my book.
Tangent maybe, but talking about where the rubber literally meets the road gets pretty interesting. Because government programs focus on politically important places, those places that are not politically important tend to have worse roads. Lots of people in those places do not care much, because they have big trucks with big tires. But once politically unimportant people are paying for bigger tires for decades, and getting hit with inflation on those tires, and still paying for other roads in other places that don't benefit them.. they get fed up eventually and this leads to the rise of angry populism and the desire to tear down road-building institutions. Doing this seems like it can't make anything worse, and will only help them be able to pay for their next flat tire, and they know that the flat is going to happen regardless of whether city-dwellers get to enjoy a new turnpike.
This is an oversimplification, but on the other hand, it really is pretty simple.
Labeling anyone as a hypocritical profiteer since they "benefit" from crappy roads that were actually paid for in full many years ago and neglected since then is one way to think about this I guess. But you could also say that it's natural for rural people to object strongly to that part of the wealth pump that actually affects them, and it really is more likely to be a function of government itself rather than corporatism. (This is because they have no disposable income to throw at corporations when there's not enough left after taxes.)
Whereas urban people are just more likely to object to the part of the wealth pump that affects them, and that's less about government and more about corporatism. The rural/urban divide will only be cured when everyone agrees that all wealth pumps are unsustainable, instead of spending all their energy fighting about how to get on the most of profitable side of the pumps.
I'm not saying the rural people in this scenario are not misguided.. but if you're completely baffled by support for things like MAGA and DOGE, then it's probably worthwhile to reflect on this.
jfengel
Government can work. All it needs is for voters to not actively hate each other. Democracy works when the politicians all agree that the good of the community as a whole matters.
That works in a lot of places. It's not perfect but it really is the best option.
If your citizens do hate each other, there really isn't any system that can work. I don't have an end game in that scenario, except to wait for it to collapse and hopefully be replaced by something else.
ben_w
While I broadly agree with your point, I think it's easy to say that the end game for many is a change in sovereignty — who gets to define what "OK" even means.
WarOnPrivacy
> It's interesting that Congress is talking about sunsetting section 230
Congress will never stop talking about Sec230. Early on it was because 230 hampered thin-skinned congress people from disappearing speech they didn't like.
ref:https://www.techdirt.com/2019/03/19/rep-devin-nunes-sues-int...
Modern attacks on 230 are more likely to enabled by major platforms, who are the only ones who can afford to defend legal attacks on user speech.
ref: https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...
Angostura
A serious body, doing serious work, but with a frequently hilarious social media account
photonthug
A very short scroll indeed to find Amazon in the crosshairs, and for good reason too. Baby stuff is always overpriced poor-quality garbage, but if you've been saying to yourself "Gee I wish it was also a suffocation hazard" then Amazon wants you to know they are here to help by a concerted effort to deregulate anything and everything.
brendoelfrendo
CPSC is a great follow: came for the gonzo photoshop collages, stayed for the relevant product safety info. Every time I see them post I have a little hope for our government.
tw04
Don’t worry, Elon is trying to kill that too.
https://populistpolicy.org/doge-analysis-of-the-consumer-pro...
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF
> The CPSC’s budget of $140 million annually supports oversight of thousands of products. Critics argue that many safety inspections could be handled by private organizations or manufacturers under government oversight.
Genuinely curious: if “under government oversight” is an acceptable option for critics, what is the CPSC currently doing that is disagreeable?
croes
> The company argues that it merely ships these goods for others — similar to UPS and FedEx — and should not be required to cooperate with the CPSC on recalls if those products are found to be unsafe.
So these other companies only pay Amazon for the shipping and nothing else, do they?
gruez
should ebay and facebook marketplace be responsible for cooperating with CPSC on recalls?
ndegruchy
If they are able to reach out to folks who have purchased on their platforms and mark offending items as recalled due to safety issues, I don't see why not. It doesn't even seem like that onerous of a task. They're not _responsible_ for the items sold, but they should be doing _some_ level of footwork making sure that items that are recalled are labeled and/or delisted.
Just like Target, Walmart and other physical retailers often work with recalls on products sold through their stores.
Aurornis
> I don't see why not. It doesn't even seem like that onerous of a task
It’s a hugely onerous task because it requires mapping every listing to a known product.
If someone sells a “green couch” then how do you track recalls for that?
You either force everyone selling anything to look it up in a big database you maintain and disallow generic sales, or everyone is just going to list things generically anyway to avoid the hassle.
It’s an idea that sounds easy when you assume everyone’s making perfectly formed listing, but sounds like a waste of time when you look at real listings.
EDIT: Replaced high chair example with a couch because people were pointing out that a high chair listing would be deleted. Though that proves my point, that any item covered by regulations wouldn’t be allowed on the platform, so if you extend regulations to cover every product ever made then you can forget about being able to buy things second hand. I’m guessing Amazon would actually love that, but you wouldn’t.
jeroenhd
Plenty of people make a business out of advertising on those platforms, so I don't see why not.
You could make an argument that Facebook doesn't really sort or categorise products by their properties, but eBay definitely does. You could also make an argument that Facebook isn't a middle man in the transaction because payment doesn't go through Facebook (unless you pick a payment option that does, of course).
I think you can defend Facebook Marketplace, but not eBay. When I use eBay, I don't wire money to John Stevens, I pay eBay directly.
eBay wants a cut, that means eBay gets part of the responsibilities too. Not for everything, of course, and they can always hold the seller accountable when those responsibilities become a problem.
Aurornis
FB marketplace listings are free and for a single item.
Ads are paid and meant to run for a very long time.
They’re not comparable in any way. If you forced marketplace sellers to the same review standards as ad buyers, it would become expensive and difficult to list things. The number of listings would collapse. People would be frustrated because they can’t buy cheap things second hand like they did in the past.
Aurornis
These ideas are attractive to a lot of people who don’t imagine any second order consequences.
They become much less popular when people are faced with the realities, like if Facebook marketplace sellers were required to collect your information and register you as the buyer (can’t have anonymous sales if they have to track buyers), higher prices, and overall reduced availability of things for sale because it’s increasingly painful for anyone to sell or buy on these marketplaces.
thinkingtoilet
Or the reality could be holding some person on Facebook to the same standard as a company making hundreds of billions of dollars is absurd. This is an absurd argument against this.
viraptor
> like if Facebook marketplace sellers were required to collect your information and register you as the buyer
Where did you take that from? None of the notifications need to come from the seller directly to the buyer.
klausa
Yes.
Zigurd
Ebay already has policies and protections again counterfeit items. It would not be a very big change in operations to add recalls.
tzs
The case between Amazon and the CPSC concerns products that are using "fulfilled by Amazon". They come from an Amazon warehouse and are shipped by Amazon. If you return the product you send it back to Amazon and Amazon refunds your money.
With Facebook Marketplace Facebook just provides a way to bring buyers and sellers together and provides payment processing. The product is shipped by the seller from someplace that is not Facebook. If you return the product you send it back to the seller, and the seller handles issuing refunds.
Those are two very different arrangements.
bnjms
If they store the product and know what it is. Yes.
Maybe Amazon can compromise. They can stop selling their own things on their platform.
croes
For business sellers of course.
Retric
That’s an interesting indirect statement that Amazon believes they are effective protection for consumer safety.
I’ve never heard of them, but I guess they are doing good work.
saidinesh5
If any Amazon employee involved in this is here, I'd love to hear their take on if/how this conflicts with their leadership principles: https://www.amazon.jobs/content/en/our-workplace/leadership-...
Whenever i interviewed there, i felt they actually abide by these and somehow this move seems to contradict their top one: Customer Obsession.
barbazoo
> Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust. Although leaders pay attention to competitors, they obsess over customers.
I don’t see a contradiction at all. Their customers want to consume cheap products and get those products instantly if possible. If removing regulation lets them sell those products cheaper, ship them faster, that’s pretty aligned with the leadership principle it seems.
Customer will continue to “trust” Amazon because that trust isn’t that the product will be good. It’ll just be that Amazon will take it back and dispose it for them and send them something different.
gradientsrneat
Amazon has treated their warehouse employees poorly for years. Poor pay. Limited breaks. Frequent injuries.
And meanwhile it's gotten harder to find good products on Amazon, while goods there have become more expensive, and Amazon uses its might to force sellers into exclusivity deals where they can't charge lower prices elsewhere.
Amazon lobbying the government to abolish a consumer rights law, or a few, seems consistent with past behavior.
robotnikman
Unfortunately, the unspoken rule in all publicly owned companies is that the shareholders matter more than anything else. No longer are we in the days of the customer is always right. The line must always go up.
dragonwriter
> Unfortunately, the unspoken rule in all publicly owned companies is that the shareholders matter more than anything else.
In most companies with shareholders, public or private, that's a written rule, right in the corporate founding documents.
mlhpdx
Can you cite actual example of such “founding documents”?
anon84873628
At the size of Amazon that principle is meaningless. Not because people don't care, but because there are too many conflicting constituents anyway. Which one do you prioritize to obsess over?
Some might care about safety and recall notices, others just want things as cheap and fast as possible (as a sibling comment explains).
There are probably product categories that Amazon would rather not bother with (because of high return rates or low margin or what have you) but they keep it around in order to attract and retain customers who are overall more profitable.
evanelias
To be fair, "obsession" often has a negative or even sinister connotation. I mean, Merriam-Webster's definition [1] includes the words "disturbing" and "unreasonable"...
spiderfarmer
[flagged]
bbarnett
This isn't reddit or slashdot, and turning everything into a post about the politics or the other team isn't helpful.
Amazon has been on a constantly downward path for a decade.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
leosanchez
> This isn't reddit or slashdot
Or Twitter
vaidhy
My team built automation for the product recalls in 2011. The process roughly was: 1. Pull the listing off. 2. Inform warehouses to pull the product off the shelves and move them to a separate area. 3. Try and get shipments stopped. 4. Notify all those who bought the product about the recall. None of these were a technical challenge.
One of my favorite business managers managed this and she would scan reviews for potential dangerous products even if CPSC has not issued any recalls.
The real problem is why do you do with the recalled products. If it is expensive enough, the seller will take it back. With the flood of really cheap goods, they need to be destroyed and it is expensive. A lot of overseas sellers will just ghost Amazon since the cost of recall might be larger than their profits from that account. The
xigency
Amazing.
As in, amazingly and horrifically awful behavior.
voytec
Potential bias warning: The Washington Post is owned by Bezos.
jfengel
The news division of the Post is still more or less reputable. Their worst failings are by omission, what they choose not to cover.
It's much like the Wall Street Journal, which is a highly regarded source of information packaged with an editorial page that reads like 4chan.
jeroenhd
Moreover, Bezos actively interferes with publications he dislikes. This isn't just an "investment company led by billionaires happens to own newspaper to extract profits" situation, the WP has become completely unreliable due to Bezos' meddling.
pfdietz
I'm already at the point where I don't trust anything Amazon is selling.
wnevets
We're well beyond the point of these massive tech companies needing to be broken up.
sandworm101
This sort of cutthroat litigation is getting too much. Once upon a time corprations actually did stuff when told by government. If a product or service was declared dangerous, it stopped. If a regulator said every room needed a fire extinguisher, the company bought fire extinguishers. Now, every little thing becomes a case for the supreme court, often literally. Insist that safety signs be in spanish? Thats heading to scotus as a profound constitutional crisis at the root of democracy, "Stop selling bombs" ... well that impacts state's rights to regulate non-lethal weapons. Im all for testing constitutionality, but this isnt about that. This is about delaying each and every tiny reg because doing so saves a buck on next week's earnings report. I dont like seeing constitutional issues used as a cover for blatant penny pinching. Amazon sells stuff. Like every other "person" selling stuff they have an obligation not to sell dangerous stuff. It isnt right that they can ignore every warning as they wait out 10+ years of litigation.
How about this: Dont think this is constitutional? How about every profit derived from the sale of anything dangerous be put in escrow until the litigation is over? Many states do this with traffic tickets.
It's interesting that Congress is talking about sunsetting section 230 which provides protection for web sites that display user generated content from being responsible for what that content says, and what Amazon wants here is apparently the equivalent for drop-ship/forwarding sales companies and the products those companies ship through them. But the argument is that safety agencies are unconstitutional?
For me, this suggests a high level of dysfunction in the Government if people asking for things from the Government do so using the biases of the people in power as the basis for their argument rather than reasoning to it by some set of principles. I don't know how much of this article was inferred by the person writing it and how much accurately reflects Amazon's position, so I can't draw strong conclusions from it but it's an interesting reflection on the extreme 'buyer beware' attitude of cut throat businesses that take no responsibility for the harms they inflict on their own customers.