| ▲ | shayway a day ago |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | gruez a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| 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. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.wawd.29... |
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| ▲ | Zigurd 5 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | To say it's "unfair" is a non sequitur. Other classes may have been denied certification because they are large. But being "unmanageable" is both vague and in no way equivalent to being unfair, as you put it. Computers are fast and capacious. You can manage a few hundred million things on your phone. | |
| ▲ | solardev a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | mikeryan 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I mean there are technical legal issues in the size of a class. For example, any member of a class can object to any settlement agreement or any multiple groups of class members can object to a settlement making managing approval difficult. The flip side to Amazons argument though is that if the judge decided the class was too big they could break into multiple classes and Amazon would end up defending themselves on multiple fronts. Usually companies facing these things want to roll it all into a single class for that reason alone. | |
| ▲ | gruez a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | >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 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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 a day ago | parent [-] | | >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 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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 a day ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | fn-mote 19 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'm allergic to the idea that these "individualized issues" cannot be resolved by some well-written queries on the sales database. Of course it is in Amazon's best interest that the court not think like a programmer. | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > For one, they can still be held to account through individual lawsuits. No-one's suing Amazon for this on an individual basis. And nor is any lawyer taking this case for a few bucks (literally). That doesn't mean there has been a wrong. That's part of the purpose of a class action. > 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) Citation? |
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| ▲ | kevin_thibedeau 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > 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 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | > which affected nearly the whole country. And people outside the US as well, though those would likely have to be separate legal matters. |
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| ▲ | Frieren 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > They also cite prior cases where class lawsuits have been denied certification because the class was too big to be manageable. Evil corp got away with it once. All evil corps should be able to do the same is not a sane argument. But it is an argument to add regulations and make large corporations accountable as soon as possible. So, make them pay for their past damage and force them to have better practices from now on. | |
| ▲ | MangoToupe a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | > resulted in lower prices in Amazon’s store lower than what? | | |
| ▲ | adrr 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Read the rest of the document from amazon, linked in my post. | | |
| ▲ | MangoToupe 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Surely you're joking. What? Why can't you just quote the relevant context? |
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| ▲ | dragonwriter a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > 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. |
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| ▲ | p1necone a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | gruez a day ago | parent [-] | | >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 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | gruez a day ago | parent | next [-] | | >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. | | |
| ▲ | tecleandor 21 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | >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? | | |
| ▲ | harimau777 18 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Enough to keep it from happening or enough to make whole everyone who was injured. | |
| ▲ | tecleandor 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Again, it's not about what is saved, it's about what it caused. If they can't expend a bit extra to avoid damage to millions of persons, maybe they shouldn't be in that business. |
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| ▲ | nzeid 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > 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 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. |
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| ▲ | justinclift 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | And they're still in business too. :( |
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| ▲ | solardev a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Uber and Lyft with regard to taxi and contractor/employee laws, Google in regards to privacy, Meta in regards to basically everything... | | |
| ▲ | gruez a day ago | parent [-] | | 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? [1] https://ubernyagsettlement.com/Portals/0/Document%20Files/NY... | | |
| ▲ | solardev a day ago | parent [-] | | 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 a day ago | parent [-] | | ...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. 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. | | |
| ▲ | mextrezza 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > 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. | |
| ▲ | LunaSea 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > or megacorps have functional legal departments to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff. Is that why Apple, Google and Meta ship a billion dollars every few years to the EU Cour of Justice? | |
| ▲ | justinclift 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > to stop them from doing obviously illegal stuff That's not what the legal departments seem to be used for though. | | |
| ▲ | gruez 20 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | justinclift 19 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Again, you don't see the illegal behavior that they didn't try. We don't know if that was due to legal departments or other factors, so claiming it was due to legal departments seems more like hope/wishing/assuming rather than actual knowledge. :( | | |
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| ▲ | malfist a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Airbnb, lyft, uber, almost any of the last generation of unicorns | |
| ▲ | mystraline 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Examples Ubercab. Later sued and changed to Uber. Now, too big to fail. Basically is illegal unlicensed uninsured scam cab company. | |
| ▲ | sjsdaiuasgdia 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > or how much money they could have plausibly gained from the offenses in question What relevance does their plausible earnings via the offense have to the fine for the offense? The harm suffered by the people whose privacy was violated is still there regardless of how much money was made through the violation. |
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| ▲ | fastball 19 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Manageable isn't just from Amazon's side, it is also an argument from the side of the plaintiffs. e.g. "This class is too diverse. It will be like herding 300 million cats, which decreases the likelihood of arriving at a suitable settlement. Better to split this into multiple classes with more specific grievances". Everyone benefits from the class being manageable (except maybe the plaintiffs' attorneys, who just want the biggest class they can possibly find). |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond 17 hours ago | parent [-] | | "decreases the likelihood"? What's the difference between a class of 20M and one of 200M? 99.98% of them aren't being surveyed for specific grievances, they're ticking a box on a letter or on a website. Let's not pretend that they're all getting surveyed for their desired outcome. |
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| ▲ | conductr 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I laughed at this line too, effectively “Our scale is so big we should only be allowed to profit from it” |
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| ▲ | SlightlyLeftPad 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Pardon me, I am looking forward to my future $0.03 cheque |
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| ▲ | jihadjihad 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Too big to fine? |
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| ▲ | sudoshred 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Too big to fail. |
