Because the direct buyer is the one who has the most information and the most control.

In contrast the end user has almost no information, so punishing them is both unfair and ineffective.

These tech companies aren't direct buyers any more than you or me. Ore is sold to smelting companies, who sell ingots to sheet metal companies, who sell it to electronics component manufacturers, who sell it to contract manufacturers, who sell it to the giants. And that's the legal supply chain - add in some shell companies, forged documents, and resellers and it gets more complicated.

> These tech companies aren't direct buyers any more than you or me

Well, they're (a) further up the supply chain that we are, and (b) have the resources to understand and influence their supply chain. You can be pedantic about the word "direct" if you like but I don't think that's useful.

But why draw the line there? If we are making the whole chain liable then why not make the phone case manufacturers and app development shops liable too? They are only one hop down the chain and have the resources too.

So now that you have the information, I trust you have stopped purchasing these products beginning today?

Information, and control.

All of the products I can buy may or may not contain this unthetical cobalt. I don't know which, and my personal buying choice doesn't effect anything.

What are you proposing, that everyone with a smartphone or a computer be sued? How will that work?

What are you proposing, that if your vendor is sued you don't pay for it?

Vendors that don't get sued can compete better in the market and survive longer, and their prices won't go up (except maybe a little as rents if they have few competitors and those have been forced to raise their prices because they've lost a lot of lawsuits), right?

[EDIT] I'd don't really give a fuck about DVs but I'd love if some of the people DVing my comments on this thread would explain how I've misunderstood orthodox "right"-wing approaches to market-based regulation and commons management, since I don't think I'm claiming anything particularly radical here—quite small-c conservative, actually—and would like to know whether and how I'm missing the mark on it.

> All of the products I can buy may or may not contain this unthetical cobalt. I don't know which, and my personal buying choice doesn't effect anything.

All of the stock these corporations can buy may or may not contain this unethically-sourced cobalt. They don't know which, and their corporate buying choices don't affect anything.

Judging from these comments, the bar seems to be set at "if you can't prove the product doesn't contain unethically-sourced materials, don't buy it". That standard would apply equally well to end users. Of course you can't simply trust that your suppliers aren't lying to you, or that their suppliers aren't lying to them, so you have to be personally involved in auditing the entire process from mining to final production and delivery.

Or we could just be reasonable and agree that it's sufficient to avoid knowing or reckless involvement with unethical suppliers, and hold those who actually endanger their workers or lie about the sources of the materials they're selling responsible for their own crimes.

hey, great job. You've turned a discussion about child exploitation into a discussion about whether some random person on the internet will stop buying electronics.

It's great to see where your priorities are.

The tech companies are only one hop away from the end user, they are not close to being the direct buyer for these operations

Corporations have far more resources than individuals, and a much smaller set of things to worry about, if this is limited to inputs or products the company themselves are responsible for creating or having created (not, say, office chairs and pens). Individuals can't just "put a person on it" (they are the person—perhaps there are a few in a household, but they still can't afford to make it any one person's job) and they consume a much wider variety of things from many more sources than your average business does (again, constrained to things core to its business).

"Well why can't they restrict themselves to a smaller set of products the supply chains of which they can verify?" well yes, they could, but this is plainly still vastly more burdensome than asking a company to simply make sure the much-smaller set of folks involved in its supply chain aren't killing kids, given the vast resource disparities between the two.

So, while pushing liability "to the end of the chain" may satisfactory complete some kind of line of ethical reasoning, practically speaking it's just a way of saying "I'd rather we do nothing". Pushing the liability to companies might actually accomplish something, without undue burden (as pushing the liability to consumers would, I think it's clear, surely have).

At any rate, isn't the market supposed to be great at sorting these things out? If we could let market-based solutions take over the role of things like food safety certification without massive increases in risk and decreases in convenience and wild inefficiency, as I've seen proposed, then surely these companies can figure out some way to organize a market for supplier validation and inspection that solve the problem more efficiently than government directly inspecting and certifying every part of every supply chain. Right?

I agree. When a child is harmed to make a product, everyone involved in creating that incentive should be held responsible. Doing so will strongly change society to stop such harms of children.

This seems backwards. Why not tackle this at the source instead of all the leaves that can potentially trace to this? If we go after all the leaves this will pretty soon involve everyone. Eg what about the app developer that profits off the iphone? What about the property owner that gets rent from the app developer for his office space? This can go on forever.

And to drive home the challenge of how hard it is to trace the providence of a manufactured device, make the end consumer pay restitution directly to the affected parties.

I'm not convinced that punishing the end consumer would be all that bad. Maybe it would generate actual participation in the market and send a message that they're the ones that fuel it.

Related: what does "punishing" a company mean anyway, fines? Those are paid for by the consumer. So what's the difference? Same as corporate taxation. Taxing and "punishing" companies but pretending that the consumer is not affected is just a political game.

If one company is bad at vetting vendors and loses lots of lawsuits, so has to raise prices, that creates an opening for competitors (existing or new) to do a better job of that, not lose a bunch of lawsuits, and crush them in the market with lower prices. No?

[EDIT] to clarify, you're right if you're talking about flat costs across all players in an industry, but wrong about fines or liability exposure that targets specific behavior, as it's possible to avoid those and retain lower costs (yes, of course, compliance and that avoidance of liability has a cost that does tend to raise prices somewhat, but so does any action aimed at accomplishing some goal, and supposedly companies are more efficient at that sort of thing than government so this should be a relatively cheap way to achieve some end, if you think markets work fairly well in general)

You can agree or disagree with how effective this would be, but it's essentially the same argument for carbon taxes on consumers and the indirect tax applied via producers: you participate in production of the negative components, you help pay the cost.

Again, not arguing for or against but what's so different about taxing consumers on behalf of actual people in a different country vs. taxing them on behalf of the environment?