ProDarwin said:
Going after the sellers does indeed make more sense, however the modern world of Ebay and Amazon its incredibly tricky. I don't know the law behind it (reading into the above, thank you for posting info), but I imagine the reasoning has a lot to do with the fact that overseas sellers seem to be able to pop up a store overnight and disappear it in a week. How do you target a seller that is actually hundreds of sellers, but has no real presence in the US and borderline doesn't exist?
I can see how the middle ground would be: pass legislation that doesnt allow this, prevents this, or warns Ebay/Amazon/Etc. that they may be held accountable in these scenarios, instead of going right for the throat.
The INFORM act seeks to solve the popup seller issue by making the platform liable with fines for not collecting and maintaining the required data above the fairly low thresholds. It's still going to be a problem to some degree but it in theory solves a decent number of issues being discussed here as well as the popup random assortment of all capital companies on Amazon. We'll just have to see how it shakes out in time.
Section 230 provides immunity to the platform for speech hosted on and allows moderation of content a platform may not want to be associated with. Both SCOTUS and the legislative branch have made noise about revising Section 230, but both know that doing so would open a can of worms that neither wants to be responsible for.
Eliminating it would effectively kill everything from Amazon to Facebook to this forum overnight because platforms would be required to take an all-or-nothing stance to moderation to avoid liability. Faced with having to test, check legality, and approve every product on its platform, online marketplaces would simply collapse under the volume of approvals required or be required to list everything anyone puts up for sale. Neither is a great place to be.
On the social front platforms like this forum would be required to approve each post after checking for illegal content, and if any slips through, they'd be liable. Alternatively, they could just allow everything, but someone would post something objectionable eventually, and then the post would be associated with the GRM brand. So, the correct thing to do in that situation is simply shut down the forum.
Ebay seems to be doing at least something to moderate the sale of these defeat devices but holding them liable because they have deep pockets and weren't 100% perfect is problematic for the reasons enumerated above.
Realistically, there's no way out of the situation without a middle ground like 230 remaining in place unless we're willing to go back to Web 1.0, which I can assure you will not happen.
I'm not completely against putting into place laws that surround Section 230, but it needs to be done in a way that solves certain issues without introducing new ones. The INFORM act, which requires sellers over 200 transactions and $5k in transaction revenue to have actual documentation, is a good first step towards that end. All would be preferable, but that creates some issues of scale if any of us just want to sell a couple hundred bucks worth of parts on FB Marketplace or Ebay.
