> Amazon is not a bad actor here.
Just to be clear, Amazon is the bad actor here, assisting worse actors. This problem exists because they don’t want to spend money managing vendors, and it’s not a problem for anyone else. I never go to Walmart and discover that the cereal has been replaced with sawdust because even a huge, cost-obsessed retailer will hold their vendor accountable for that.
If the government started enforcing real penalties, each order would have an easy way to report this, they’d actually accept abuse reports when you get a contact from a vendor buying reviews, and they’d start spending money reviewing products themselves like other retailers do.
If you haven’t heard of it, in addition to traditional inventory there’s an entire profession around “mystery shopping” where businesses pay normal people to use their services and report their experiences. They’re explicitly trying to catch dishonest middle managers and suppliers who might do things like pull expired food from the shelves when it’s time for the annual inventory or make a better meal for someone they recognize as a corporate employee, and it’d be very, very easy for Amazon to check sellers the same way and if they actively solicited abuse reports they’d have an easy prioritization mechanism. It’d cut slightly into their profit margins but I doubt Bezos would even have to reduce the number of spacecraft he buys because I’ve heard so many people mention not buying things on Amazon because they’ve been burned by fraud in the past.