alt Hacker NewsI wonder just like retailers are required to account for local sales taxes (I know it is not that clear cut), there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally. Setup an agency which "legally" provides support for google, Amazon, and all those unreachable entities. Provides local jobs as well as quick grievance redressal. Maybe something like consumer protection agency but not federal, maybe at least one per county maybe more depending on the population.
Edit - I don't mind paying for the service. Maybe charge everyone $99 to file a case to avoid everyone piling on, but it helps resolve most egregious ones, and fee could be refunded at the agency's discretion.
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How would that work for countries where Amazon doesn't have a legal presence? A foreign court would be able to do anything.
Or maybe pass some laws with more penalties for defrauding your own customers.
> there should be some enforcement mechanism to settle disputes locally.
They are called courts and they exist.
Of course, companies like to require you to agree to binding arbitration, instead.
The solution to authoritarian problems is to organize.
In this case, we're overdue for a service that we all pay into, like a collective credit card, that only continues making payments to companies like Amazon if all of the members are happy. When you get banned without due process, payments stop until the matter is resolved.
Also, the collective can bargain-down rates. If it senses price increases beyond inflation, it just sends the adjusted amount, like 95%, until the matter is resolved.
We need this collective bargaining for housing (like tenant unions), the workplace, politics, pharmaceuticals, etc. The scale of this is so large that the collective could exist beyond any specific industry. So that it would operate as a meta economy beside the so-called free market economy (late-stage capitalism) that we operate under today due to the lack of antitrust enforcement.
Groups like the Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WEAll) are working towards these sorts of goals on a number of fronts:
I can't speak for how effective the process is, but this is the idea behind the EU/UK GPSR's Authorised Representative framework - though not exactly local (that would be excessive, since GPSR also applies to much smaller sellers too)