Every hour spent manually reviewing product pages could instead be spent growing food, producing shoes, building homes, providing accounting services, etc.

This doesn't mean it is or needs to be determined centrally - just that it is an economic truth that will bear out regardless. Amazon might hire 1,000 workers for this, pulling them implicitly from all of the other jobs they would otherwise have taken.

Maybe it would be a net-win, and maybe not. But from society's standpoint it really doesn't matter whether it is profitable for Amazon or not. We'd be trading less fraud on Amazon for less of everything else.

(Anymore, I don't by anything but detergent, screen protectors & phone cases from AMZN, ftr.)

I shop to get cool stuff. Not to convey meaning.

But that's not the holistic conversation and consideration I see coming through. All I'm seeing is a one-sided focus on what Amazon can (should) do about it.

"Minimal risk while still permitting economic growth / treating disease" vs "no risk"

It's fair to apply the same standards to internet companies. A hyper efficient Amazon has social benefits.

(That said, I agree that the optimal point for Amazon and most internet companies is a lot stricter than how our current laws are enforced)

If it's too big to keep legal, maybe it's too big. It was YouTube's choice to allow everyone to upload as much as they like.

(I personally come down on the side of "it is valid").

"Ships from and Sold by Amazon" if you don't want foreign sellers.

That doesn't solve the problem, because it locks out legit Chinese sellers. Solving the problem is hard.

Does your multi vitamin actually contain every vitamin it says it does in the dosage it should? For many things you really depend on reputation and outside regulations as you’re hardly going to send random samples to a lab.

Even reputable companies make use of this. Look into how often SSD internals get downgrading without changing the product’s label.

In Amazon, the user interacts with a product, and from here can either allow it to be fulfilled from whatever's its default seller, or select one explicitly. In AliExpress, the user interacts with the [product,seller], so in search you'll generally see 50 instances of the same product, and leave it to the user to decide which one to open into Product Details. IMHO, the Amazon interaction is far superior. (that's not an excuse for them not to look for a solution)

I agree that in fulfillment, Amazon is causing problem. But I still believe that in User Interaction, the Amazon approach is better for most users.