> Amazon argued that the class was too large to be manageable
Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
gruez · 3h ago
Looking at Amazon's filings, the argument they made is the following:
>Given the unprecedented size of the proposed class consisting of 288 million members, the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store, Plaintiffs have not—and cannot demonstrate that a class action would be manageable.
The "individualized issues" references arguments presented earlier in the filing. They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. You might disagree with Amazon's lawyers here, but it's unfair to characterize it as "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable". It's an "wild" argument because it's a strawman.
I don't see the difference between what the lawyers are saying and the parent's summary of it.
> we've wronged too many people to be held accountable
Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be?
In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
> Chun found there was no evidence at this stage that the size of the class was overbroad. Other federal courts had certified class actions with millions or hundreds of millions of class members, the judge said.
gruez · 2h ago
>Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be?
You missed the other 2 of the 3 parts of that argument.
>In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
I'm not saying they're objectively right, just that there's more to the argument than "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable".
solardev · 2h ago
So it's not really a strawman at all, and it was in fact one of their main arguments. They just also made other arguments on top of that...
Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
gruez · 2h ago
>and it was in fact one of their main arguments
It really wasn't. If you look at the table of contents, the part about was the class being too big was:
1. in one of the two top level arguments (II)
2. of (II), it was one of 6 sub-arguments (F)
3. of (F), the actual argument is "Plaintiffs Have Not Satisfied Rule 23(b)(3)’s Superiority Requirement.", of which the class was too big was one of three factors. For reference the other two are "the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store"
>Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
It really isn't. The specific legal standard is that if the total time to adjudicate all the class members is large, then class certification should be denied. This seems reasonable to me, at least in isolation. What's the point of a legal case that takes so long to resolve that by the time it's finished, everyone involved would be dead? Again, you might not agree with Amazon's argument that it's too complex to be resolved, and it's fine to deride them for thinking that the case is too complex for the court system to handle, but they're simply not making the claim that they should be let off the hook on the basis of 300 million plaintiffs alone.
solardev · 2h ago
Sorry, I don't agree that any of that fundamentally changes the wild argument that "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable!".
But, hey, I'm just a rando on the internet. Feel free to disregard this comment.
gruez · 1h ago
For one, they can still be held to account through individual lawsuits. Also at least part of the reason behind class action lawsuits is to streamline the lawsuit process. If a lawsuit ends up taking 100 years because that's long it takes to adjudicate each class member (which was the case in a prior unrelated lawsuit), then arguably a class action lawsuit is a poor fit. As the saying goes, justice delayed is justice denied. If you're allergic to nuance and want to round these considerations off to "you can't be held to account if you wronged too many people", then go for it, I can't stop you.
kevin_thibedeau · 49m ago
> overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store
Shkreli made back all the money from his clients that he misappropriated (by gambling with Retrophin shares). He still went to jail for fraud.
nickff · 23m ago
That was a criminal charge, not a class-action, and very different rules apply. Shkreli also committed one set of frauds against one company which affected many people; Amazon engaged in separate anti-competitive acts against many different companies which affected nearly the whole country.
justinclift · 11m ago
> which affected nearly the whole country.
And people outside the US as well, though those would likely have to be separate legal matters.
MangoToupe · 2h ago
> resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store
lower than what?
adrr · 1h ago
Or increased prices outside of Amazon. If you sold a shirt from your own website with 10% in selling costs and also sold on FBA where Amazon takes ~30%, do you lower prices on Amazon to match the price on your site(not allowed) or do raise prices on your own store? Factor in your gross margins that you're trying to hit.
gruez · 1h ago
Read the rest of the document from amazon, linked in my post.
dragonwriter · 1h ago
> Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
Class actions, as an alternative to the normal direct action lawsuits, are an accommodation in the legal system for economy of justice; a class that is too diverse in how they are situated with respect to the issues raised (which is a more accurate summary than the article’s “too large” for Amazon’s argument) negate that function.
I’m not saying the court ruled incorrectly on Amazon’s argument, just that the article is misleading on what the argument actually is.
p1necone · 3h ago
Unfortunately this approach seems to fly all the time for large businesses.
Plucky startup takes the 'ask forgiveness rather than permission' approach and ignores a bunch of regulations, legal system doesn't care because they're just a plucky startup.
10 or so years later plucky startup is a massive corpo, another 5 or so years later the legal system catches up but they're a massive corpo making piles of cash and the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.
gruez · 3h ago
>up but they're a massive corpo making piles of cash and the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.
Examples? Usually when I see this argument being brought up, it's usually something like "[multinational megacorp] fined $x for breaking Belgian privacy laws", and then people pile in saying how "$x is 1% of [multinational megacorp]'s turnover" and therefore the fine is just "a cost of doing business", but neglecting to account for how much % of their revenue is in Belgium, or how much money they could have plausibly gained from the offenses in question.
briffle · 2h ago
Equifax: In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The company has agreed to a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories. The settlement includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the data breach.
Apparently, your personal information is worth about $2.90.
justinclift · 9m ago
And they're still in business too. :(
gruez · 2h ago
>Equifax: In September of 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that exposed the personal information of 147 million people. The company has agreed to a global settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and 50 U.S. states and territories. The settlement includes up to $425 million to help people affected by the data breach.
How much money did they make from the breach though? The argument made by the gp was that the fines were "pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.". According to FTC's press release, they were fined at least $575M for "failure to take reasonable steps to secure its network". How much do you think did you think equifax saved by skimping on security? Probably not $575M. They got pwned by an outdated third party library. There's no way keeping your libraries up to date is going to cost anywhere near that amount.
nzeid · 23m ago
> How much do you think did you think equifax saved by skimping on security? Probably not $575M. They got pwned by an outdated third party library. There's no way keeping your libraries up to date is going to cost anywhere near that amount.
I took their post to mean that the $2.90 figure included damages.
In your words, how much will the ensuing fraud, identity theft, and spam cost me?
gruez · 7m ago
Yes, but you're moving the goalposts. The original argument was essentially that crime pays, because you'll only get fined a fraction of what you saved/made.
tecleandor · 1h ago
Fines should be higher than the cost avoided, or companies would just avoid the cost until get caught.
Also, it's not only about the cost avoided, but about the damage to the people while you were doing that. If you're making money moving logging trucks, you skimp 50 dollars per trip in some straps to fix the load, and then a couple logs fall, run over a car, and almost kill a bunch of people, I'm not expecting you to pay just for the 50 dollars and the car repair.
gruez · 6m ago
>Fines should be higher than the cost avoided, or companies would just avoid the cost until get caught.
Again, how much do you think Equifax saved from skimping on security? Sure, spending $575M would have prevented the hack, but how much did they have to spend to be considered not negligent?
solardev · 3h ago
Uber and Lyft with regard to taxi and contractor/employee laws, Google in regards to privacy, Meta in regards to basically everything...
gruez · 2h ago
You haven't identified a specific case in any of the examples so I asked an LLM to do it for you, and came up with two:
1. O'Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc (2013): So far as I can tell, they settled for $20M, but the settlement allowed uber to continue classifying drivers as contractors. You might be able to spin this as how uber is above the law or whatever, but the alternate take is that the drivers had a weak case, and were settling for whatever they could get. Not the best case to argue that companies are fined too little.
2. New York AG vs Uber: it seems like the settlement was two parts: a cash payout for past drivers and additional benefits to drivers going forward. Digging deeper into the settlement, it looks like for the former like uber's crime was improperly deducting sales taxes and black car fees[1], rather than failing to pay benefits. It doesn't look like uber got fined at all for not providing benefits. Again, you can frame this as uber being so above the law that they got fined $0 (!), but the argument from above applies. Maybe the NY AG had a weak case. Clearly they're willing to fine uber for something as vague as improper sales tax deductions, so why didn't they go for damages for uber not paying benefits?
I think this is only proving the parent's point, that the legal system is completely unable to deal with the megacorps. Shrug. I don't read those results the same way you do.
gruez · 1h ago
...or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff. Of the cases they actually get sued for, there's enough complexity and genuine question of law that they can't straightforwardly prosecuted. There's a reason why basically all states had to pass bills to reclassify gig work companies, rather than winning slam dunk cases with years of back pay.
Maybe all of this basically cashes out to "the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change" to you, but to me this looks like a functioning legal system where defendants actually have a fair chance of winning.
mextrezza · 23m ago
> In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined.
Not always! lawyers representing classes in class actions don't always negotiate as hard as they could or should during settlements. You're probably familiar with federal judge Lucy Koh's prominent cases.
Not really understanding your argument that everything is fine, and there's nothing to see here.
justinclift · 8m ago
> to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff
That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though.
gruez · 12s ago
Again, you don't see the illegal behavior that they didn't try. For instance, Uber probably could have nabbed more market share by allowing drivers to pick people up off the streets as well, but that would obviously break taxi medallion laws. Uber worked within the pre-booked ride service loophole. Same goes for contractor classification. They probably could have gotten better customer satisfaction ratings if they prohibited drivers from using multiple apps, but that would obviously look bad for them if they wanted to argue drivers were contractors.
malfist · 2h ago
Airbnb, lyft, uber, almost any of the last generation of unicorns
sudoshred · 5m ago
Too big to fail.
crazygringo · 3h ago
> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.
I've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc.
So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
jazzyjackson · 5m ago
I immediately just click the back button when some spin wheel discount thing pops up, I just figured it was temu leaking. Thank you for explaining why they are doing this, tho I still wonder why it has to be gamified and not just, click here for a coupon, is it because the agreement with Amazon precludes them from offering coupons, but neglects to forbid casino games?
levkk · 3h ago
That can easily be perceived as violating the ToS and get you kicked off the marketplace. Big risk to take if that's where you're making most of your $.
crazygringo · 2h ago
I doubt it. I've seen this for products with 10,000+ reviews. It's totally mainstream. If Amazon had a problem with it, they would have cracked down already.
What can they say, that "20% off your cart" coupons are prohibited anywhere else the product is listed? That's not feasible. You see North Face doing the same thing with sports retailers. Their jackets never go on sale, but retailers make cart-wide promotions available so you can still get the discount.
scyzoryk_xyz · 1h ago
That savvy reality in which we all spin fucking discount prize wheels every time we buy something just because someone managed to monopolize a market.
IncreasePosts · 2h ago
Neither here nor there, but about 15 years ago while I was a fresh grad/hire at Amazon, I realized that the crawler that was supposed to enforce this had not been running for multiple years. I went out and fixed it and got it running again, and I showed about $8M/month revenue increase from this.
What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)
_DeadFred_ · 1h ago
Brave to tell about that time you fixed the snitching machine. But I appreciate you telling it and I don't think you should get downvotes
IncreasePosts · 1h ago
If a machine catches you doing something you weren't supposed to do, it doesn't seem like snitching. Are red light cameras snitches?
mrbluecoat · 3h ago
> Amazon argued, that the class was too large to be manageable
LOL, they literally have a giant data center at their disposal and some of the best automation geniuses in the world.
thinkingtoilet · 3h ago
"I'm sorry your honor. We're breaking the law at such an extent it is impossible for us to be held responsible for it."
nickff · 3h ago
The federal government actually makes that argument all the time, and often prevails with it.
Very excited for my impending choice between a 30-day extension to my Prime membership or a $5 off of $50 coupon for anything in the Prime Fresh store.
...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
nosignono · 1h ago
> The consumers’ 2021 lawsuit said Amazon violated antitrust law by restricting third-party sellers from offering their products for lower prices elsewhere on rival platforms while they are also for sale on Amazon.
Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
OkayPhysicist · 59m ago
Valve does not do this. Best I can tell, the idea that they do was created either maliciously or incompetently by the law firm suing them on antitrust grounds. What Valve does is assert that you may not offer Steam keys for your game at lower prices on other platforms, permanently. This is only possible because Steam lets game makers sell Steam licenses to their games on other platforms, cutting Valve out of the platform fees altogether. If you list your game on both the Epic Games store and Steam, you're just fine setting different prices on the two. If you sell Steam products keys to your users directly, who can then go and use those keys to claim your game on Steam, you can't undercut your Steam store listing on a permanent basis. You are even allowed to do temporary promotions on other platforms where you sell your Steam keys that you don't on Steam.
speff · 1h ago
Elden Ring is currently $15 cheaper on GameBillet compared to Steam[0] - it even comes with a Steam activation key. If Valve did the same thing, sites like isthereanydeal.com wouldn't really have as much of a purpose.
Every single major retailer does this. It's not collusion, it's just smart policy. Shelf space is insanely valuable. Retailers have customers walking around their stores (or making searches in Amazon's case) at the final step in the sales funnel. No retailer wants to get a customer that close to buying (often at considerable expense) then lose them because the brand either has weak channel price control or is trying to divert customers to their own website by offering a discount.
giancarlostoro · 3h ago
So what are we all looking at? $100 a piece? Lol "Have you used Amazon from the years x to y?" If it covers 2020 thats basically most Americans.
like_any_other · 3h ago
$100 each for 330 million Americans sums to $33 billion, which is about half of Amazon's yearly profit (the whole company, not just e-commerce). While I think it should be higher still (anti-competitive practices should be harshly punished), it's not negligible. The real point isn't in the consumer payout, but in discouraging these practices, so that a handful of companies don't get a chokehold on the market (one could argue it's a bit late for that...)
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
It should be 10% gross over the time period covered in the case (or about $65 billion per year)
xyst · 3h ago
It’s quite awful that the best this country can do at "enforcing" antitrust violations is through class action lawsuits.
The only people that benefit here are the lawyers on both sides.
pessimizer · 2h ago
That's what a do-nothing Congress gets you.
maxwell · 2h ago
Our poor representation is an extreme outlier among OECD countries:
Nordic countries have similar representation to the U.S. in the early 1800s.
Though virtual, Colonial Americans had better representation in Parliament.
henryfjordan · 56m ago
Virtual representation isn't representation at all, and was so repugnant that we fought a war over it.
egypturnash · 3h ago
aaaw hell yeah
roughly · 3h ago
Interesting to see this moving forward in the new administration. I guess spiking the WaPo Harris endorsement wasn't quite enough to get Bezos out of the crosshairs.
Sorry, we've wronged too many people to be held accountable! What a wild argument.
>Given the unprecedented size of the proposed class consisting of 288 million members, the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store, Plaintiffs have not—and cannot demonstrate that a class action would be manageable.
The "individualized issues" references arguments presented earlier in the filing. They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. You might disagree with Amazon's lawyers here, but it's unfair to characterize it as "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable". It's an "wild" argument because it's a strawman.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29...
> we've wronged too many people to be held accountable
Sounds like exactly what it is... it's too big of a class to be managed, and therefore should not be?
In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
> Chun found there was no evidence at this stage that the size of the class was overbroad. Other federal courts had certified class actions with millions or hundreds of millions of class members, the judge said.
You missed the other 2 of the 3 parts of that argument.
>In fact, the very next line is the judge saying:
I'm not saying they're objectively right, just that there's more to the argument than "we've wronged too many people to be held accountable".
Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
It really wasn't. If you look at the table of contents, the part about was the class being too big was:
1. in one of the two top level arguments (II)
2. of (II), it was one of 6 sub-arguments (F)
3. of (F), the actual argument is "Plaintiffs Have Not Satisfied Rule 23(b)(3)’s Superiority Requirement.", of which the class was too big was one of three factors. For reference the other two are "the individualized issues on which their claims depend, and the overwhelming evidence that the challenged conduct resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store"
>Seems to me the parent was totally justified in calling it a wild argument.
It really isn't. The specific legal standard is that if the total time to adjudicate all the class members is large, then class certification should be denied. This seems reasonable to me, at least in isolation. What's the point of a legal case that takes so long to resolve that by the time it's finished, everyone involved would be dead? Again, you might not agree with Amazon's argument that it's too complex to be resolved, and it's fine to deride them for thinking that the case is too complex for the court system to handle, but they're simply not making the claim that they should be let off the hook on the basis of 300 million plaintiffs alone.
But, hey, I'm just a rando on the internet. Feel free to disregard this comment.
Shkreli made back all the money from his clients that he misappropriated (by gambling with Retrophin shares). He still went to jail for fraud.
And people outside the US as well, though those would likely have to be separate legal matters.
lower than what?
Class actions, as an alternative to the normal direct action lawsuits, are an accommodation in the legal system for economy of justice; a class that is too diverse in how they are situated with respect to the issues raised (which is a more accurate summary than the article’s “too large” for Amazon’s argument) negate that function.
I’m not saying the court ruled incorrectly on Amazon’s argument, just that the article is misleading on what the argument actually is.
Plucky startup takes the 'ask forgiveness rather than permission' approach and ignores a bunch of regulations, legal system doesn't care because they're just a plucky startup.
10 or so years later plucky startup is a massive corpo, another 5 or so years later the legal system catches up but they're a massive corpo making piles of cash and the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.
Examples? Usually when I see this argument being brought up, it's usually something like "[multinational megacorp] fined $x for breaking Belgian privacy laws", and then people pile in saying how "$x is 1% of [multinational megacorp]'s turnover" and therefore the fine is just "a cost of doing business", but neglecting to account for how much % of their revenue is in Belgium, or how much money they could have plausibly gained from the offenses in question.
Apparently, your personal information is worth about $2.90.
How much money did they make from the breach though? The argument made by the gp was that the fines were "pocket change compared to the piles of cash they made while ignoring those regulations.". According to FTC's press release, they were fined at least $575M for "failure to take reasonable steps to secure its network". How much do you think did you think equifax saved by skimping on security? Probably not $575M. They got pwned by an outdated third party library. There's no way keeping your libraries up to date is going to cost anywhere near that amount.
I took their post to mean that the $2.90 figure included damages.
In your words, how much will the ensuing fraud, identity theft, and spam cost me?
Also, it's not only about the cost avoided, but about the damage to the people while you were doing that. If you're making money moving logging trucks, you skimp 50 dollars per trip in some straps to fix the load, and then a couple logs fall, run over a car, and almost kill a bunch of people, I'm not expecting you to pay just for the 50 dollars and the car repair.
Again, how much do you think Equifax saved from skimping on security? Sure, spending $575M would have prevented the hack, but how much did they have to spend to be considered not negligent?
1. O'Connor v. Uber Technologies, Inc (2013): So far as I can tell, they settled for $20M, but the settlement allowed uber to continue classifying drivers as contractors. You might be able to spin this as how uber is above the law or whatever, but the alternate take is that the drivers had a weak case, and were settling for whatever they could get. Not the best case to argue that companies are fined too little.
2. New York AG vs Uber: it seems like the settlement was two parts: a cash payout for past drivers and additional benefits to drivers going forward. Digging deeper into the settlement, it looks like for the former like uber's crime was improperly deducting sales taxes and black car fees[1], rather than failing to pay benefits. It doesn't look like uber got fined at all for not providing benefits. Again, you can frame this as uber being so above the law that they got fined $0 (!), but the argument from above applies. Maybe the NY AG had a weak case. Clearly they're willing to fine uber for something as vague as improper sales tax deductions, so why didn't they go for damages for uber not paying benefits?
[1] https://ubernyagsettlement.com/Portals/0/Document%20Files/NY...
In cases companies megacorps are clearly breaking laws, they're appropriately fined. eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44767461
Maybe all of this basically cashes out to "the worst the legal system can do at that point is penalize them with the equivalent of pocket change" to you, but to me this looks like a functioning legal system where defendants actually have a fair chance of winning.
Not always! lawyers representing classes in class actions don't always negotiate as hard as they could or should during settlements. You're probably familiar with federal judge Lucy Koh's prominent cases.
Not really understanding your argument that everything is fine, and there's nothing to see here.
That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though.
I've noticed that third-party sellers generally get around this by having the same list price on their own site, but basically offering everyone a coupon for 15-30% off. Not just for signing up for e-mails, but spinning a wheel that pops up a discount, items that are on sale 95% of the time, etc.
So while this may very well be anticompetitive of Amazon, at the same time it's generally something savvy sellers and savvy consumers have been able to get around easily for a long time.
What can they say, that "20% off your cart" coupons are prohibited anywhere else the product is listed? That's not feasible. You see North Face doing the same thing with sports retailers. Their jackets never go on sale, but retailers make cart-wide promotions available so you can still get the discount.
What did I get? From my skip level manager: "Great job, but too bad about that bug. Next time if it's perfect we can talk about promo" (the crawler went down for a day from an edge case that was preexisting, I fixed it same day)
LOL, they literally have a giant data center at their disposal and some of the best automation geniuses in the world.
...after 5 years of lawfare and gozillions spent, of course. :/
Holy shit, do Valve next! They do the exact same thing.
[0]: https://isthereanydeal.com/game/elden-ring/info/
The only people that benefit here are the lawyers on both sides.
https://www.amacad.org/ourcommonpurpose/enlarging-the-house/...
Nordic countries have similar representation to the U.S. in the early 1800s.
Though virtual, Colonial Americans had better representation in Parliament.