It's like how when you buy something now you need to take a photo and email it to your local police station to prove you weren't buying drugs or something.
I know, imagine what would have happened to society if people unwinded after a long day of work in their own home with weed, or if they drank coffee every morning. /s
It's not though. There's no govenment enforcement on either of those parties. The ban is worded below from a government page, and puts the entire burden on the website host to enforce it all.
> Website hosts are accountable for the reviews on their page. Businesses and online platforms will be legally required to take steps to prevent and remove the publication of fake reviews that are published on their websites. This could include, for example, having adequate detection and removal procedures in place to prevent fake reviews being published.
By the government's own wording, it sounds like any competent Amazon seller and competent Amazon reviewer can continue buying and selling fake reviews with each other over Facebook, Gmail, and PayPal, just like they have for years, with no consequences, even if they publically admit to it to a government prosecuter. They just have to stay under the radar of Amazon. Don't do too many under one account; make sure to sprinkle a lot of legitimate reviews in with the fakes. Amazon just needs to say in court that they did their best to look for these people.
All Amazon can do is look at the data they have—which is pretty much just the actual reviews written by actual people on actual products—and do some data science, astrology, and tea leaf reading to call some of them fake reviewers. When really, there's no possible way they can detect a skilled one. They don't have subpoena power to check their Facebook messages or PayPal transactions.
There are people who have been getting hundreds of $100-plus dollar products from Amazon free for 5+ years by just writing a quick fake review for it. There is a huge ecosystem of factories in China with Amazon seller accounts and fake review agents in Lahore, Pakistan, and places like that, who intermediate this, and then spreadsheets of thousands of products you can choose from, from hundreds of different sellers.
So will Amazon go to the trouble of infiltrating these networks to find the exact product pages that are being offered in exchange for fake reviews? As far as I can tell, Amazon wants fake reviews to happen. It's how a new product gets it's initial reviews. Nobody's going to buy a product with no reviews. I don't think the government is going to be able to burden Amazon with hiring Pinkerton detectives to infiltrate these networks; that type of enforement work doesn't seem like something that a court could require a private business to do. And the government hasn't said these networks are against the law; just that the website hosts can't host their reviews. So, I doubt this will have much effect on Amazon. It will probably only be enforced on more flagrant websites, where all the reviews are just AI-generated slop.
