Amazon.com’s battle against product recalls continues

Bloomberg

A US safety regulator’s decision to sue Amazon.com Inc could bring clarity to a question that has long befuddled courts and state legislatures nationwide: Who is responsible when a product bought from the world’s largest online retailer hurts or kills someone?
In recent years, dozens of people who say they were harmed by products, such as exploding hoverboards, defective batteries or faulty dog collars, have sued Amazon for compensation. The company argues it’s not liable, pointing instead to the third-party sellers that technically sold the items and are sometimes based overseas beyond the reach of US jurisprudence. Several courts have agreed with Amazon, citing product liability laws that never contemplated online shopping or digital middlemen.
But last week, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission sued Amazon, seeking to compel the company to participate in formal recalls of dozens of defective products sold by merchants on its sprawling marketplace. The regulator is also seeking what would be a precedent-setting ruling that Amazon is a distributor of consumer products under federal law, a designation that would subject the company to future mandatory recalls on behalf of its sellers. Declaring Amazon a distributor would upend a commonplace tech industry defense deployed by companies from Facebook to Google, which claim they aren’t responsible for what’s said, posted or sold on their platforms.
“If CPSC wins on this, it’s going to be a huge deal for Amazon,” says Boaz Green, a former agency staffer who works for Neal Cohen Law advising companies that sell their products on Amazon. Product safety advocates and some in Congress have been calling for action to tame “what’s perceived as this Wild West, unregulated market, with all small sellers they can’t get at. But they can get at Amazon, or they can try.”