Today American Family Voices, Public Citizen and Athena issued a warning to Americans: Beware of the potentially dangerous and fake products sold on Amazon during this holiday season. Numerous press and investigative reports document Amazon’s apparent pattern of selling banned, unsafe, counterfeit or mislabeled products, including some under its own AmazonBasics brand and with the “Amazon’s Choice” label. For years, Amazon, has abused Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, to claim that it has no liability when the products it sells are defective, or when they injure or kill consumers.
The consumer watchdogs are asking federal policymakers to end this practice, and to require that online retailers like Amazon are liable when they sell fake, defective and dangerous products just like their brick-and-mortar competitors.
“This holiday season, more people are turning to online retailers like Amazon to avoid being exposed to COVID-19,” said Lauren Windsor, executive director of American Family Voices. “And this week many of us will rush to order products online to send to kids, grandkids and other relatives so they arrive before the holidays. What unwary consumers may not know is that unlike other brick-and-mortar retailers, Amazon uses an unintended loophole in the law to claim it has no liability for selling dangerous and defective products. That helps explain why they have a pattern of selling dangerous products with such impunity. Consumers should beware.”
In response to exposés by CNN and the Wall Street Journal, Amazon agreed to remove a variety of banned, recalled, unsafe and fake products that media outlets found for sale on its platform. But the publications reported that within weeks, the same goods were listed for sale on Amazon again.
“Amazon has rigged the rules so it can rake in billions while dodging safety inspections and then responsibility when the products it sells hurt people or burn down houses,” said Lori Wallach, director of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch. “Whatever one thinks should be Big Tech’s responsibility for content on their platforms, certainly shielding mega-retailers like Amazon from liability when they sell products that hurt people was never the intention of policy designed to protect free speech on the Internet. Combine this liability dodge with Amazon’s abuse of the “de minimis” loophole in U.S. Customs law that allows its billions per week of Chinese imports to skirt border safety inspection and Amazon could threaten perfect people nationwide with a flood of dangerous products.”
The “de minimis” loophole allows individual Americans to bring goods worth $800 or less into the United States without paying taxes or being inspected. Using huge shipping containers of goods pre-labeled to consumers’ addresses, Amazon pretends that specific consumers, not Amazon, are importing products. Billions in such goods weekly from China and other nations thus dodge consumer safety and other border inspections and avoid millions in taxes that brick and mortar stores pay on identical goods. This combined with the waiver that Amazon claims Section 230 provides against product liability creates a dangerous dynamic for holiday shoppers.
“With the pandemic raging and winter holidays coming up, we’re all relying more on online shopping. Customers deserve products that aren’t dangerous or counterfeit. We also deserve to know that our shopping won’t raise the risk that workers will be injured or exposed to COVID-19, and that it won’t feed a corporate behemoth that uses data to target Black, brown, and immigrant communities. This holiday season, it’s clear that Amazon has betrayed the trust the public once put in this American institution,” said Dania Rajendra, Director of the Athena Coalition.
“Jeff Bezos’s corporation has ignored growing concerns about unsafe products and used their monopoly power to avoid any accountability for this problem, just like it has used its power to evade responsibility for their abuse of workers, small businesses, and our communities. Amazon’s callousness toward us all means elected officials must step in, curb Amazon’s power, and break the corporation up,” concluded Rajendra.
