alt Hacker NewsAlmost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire.
Businesses are made to make it easier to share profits and responsibilities when trying to fulfill users wants. Laws are made to offer protections for consumers (because nobody has time for common sense), but at the end of the day the consumer has to take responsibility or no products can be made. If you're too fat for a chair, it's on you to find or make one that works- not every product is for every person. Laws only stop chairs being sold that are too dangerous for anyone.
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I see an economic and social problem:
Freedom as in freedom of private property can only be guaranteed by the State. The State watches over its own population and makes sure that private property, i.e. capital and work, is made productive, so people go to work, businesses make profits, and everybody pays taxes. Taxes are the State's prime source of income.
When all these million of private interests collide, which they are bound to do, the State provides a jurisdictional system that has to decide between those private interests and the State's own interests.
E.g.: If a business owner refuses access to medical patents or to lower prices and safe potentially people's lives, the State has to decide between that immediate interest and its own interests, which is protecting private capital, as its source of income. Since I'm in Germany: In the emission scandal Volkswagen didn't just physically harm people, VW violated the private property of millions of customers. Despite that, the German State sided with Volkswagen the larger capital and did nothing. During Corona, the German State refused to open patents for a limited time to help safe people's lives in poor countries. Doing so would've violated the interest of private capital, so it refused. In contrast, if I as an individual refuse to help somebody in an emergency, the State would either fine me or put me in jail. In this case, people's lives become the State's prime interests, because they are also the State's source of income, as a productive workforce.
> Almost all jurisdictions allow businesses which cannot be held liable for all their actions. Imagine losing you house because someone decided to smother themselves in your infused cooking oil and light themselves on fire.
How would that be the company's action? The only way the business might be liable is if they advertised their product as safe to use when lighting yourself on fire or if there was already some law that required them to warn customers not to light themselves on fire while using the product and they ignored that law.
In this case, it's not about what somebody else did. It's what Google did. There were already laws against lying about companies by saying they did illegal things when they didn't, google broke the law, so that's what google got in trouble for.
Consumer protection laws aren't there to replace common sense, they're there to prevent things like outright fraud and poisonings/murder.