Amazon is similar. Their service is essentially to make buying the random, weirdly-named products from China as “safe” and convenient as possible. (By “safe” I mean a bare minimum of having a generous return policy. Not that they are actually vetting safety.)

I would place Temu, Alibaba, and TikTok shop somewhere on that same spectrum of safety.

It’s incredible how unsafe our products are. They are practically unvetted, and even when they are, Amazon sells counterfeits under the same SKU comingling. And risks nothing because the product was technically sold by “INXBDBA”.

Having been to Armenia, which has practically no laws because it’s not part of the EU, I wonder what would happen “naturally”, if EU laws didn’t exist in the EU. Maybe we’d get exactly the same quality of products.

> And risks nothing because the product was technically sold by “INXBDBA”.

The kicker is that this is a classic "cobra effect" [1] that has bogged down government offices. Those useless brands exist because Amazon tried to cut down on counterfeits and no-name junk by implementing a policy of requiring the brand to be a registered trademark. Instead of cutting down on junk products, it led to an explosion of junk brands [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/style/amazon-trademark-co...