The news is that the free ride for digital e-commerce platforms is about to end. Other than tax avoidance and tax evasion that are difficult to fight. Here we are dealing with problems of enormous scope and fairly rapid identification, because an American judge, in the middle of summer, in California, established that platforms such as Amazon (it will only be hard with the Chinese Alibaba) are to be considered directly responsible for what the products they sell may cause. And this in itself is already bombshell news, which the blog lacasadipaola.it recently gave a preview of.
This means that in America, in the name of an ancient but fair proverb, who makes mistakes pays. Something that had never happened for the e-commerce giants, at least until this summer, because – claimed the endless army of their lawyers and consultants – their role would be that of mere intermediaries. Principle declared false by the Californian Court of Appeals.
But the new, even more sensational news is that this fundamental principle of consumer protection cross the ocean and will also be applied in Europe, but without eternal bureaucratic times. This is thanks to Aires, the association that brings together the consumer electronics and household appliances retail chains in Italy, and the European Consumer Electronics Retail Council (EuCER), a non-profit association founded by Aires, E-Square, Euronics International, Expert International and Unieuro. In fact, the credit goes to the Italian Davide Rossi who for years, as director general of Aires and president of Optime, the Observatory for the Protection of the Electronics Market in Italy, has been fighting, on behalf of EuCER and in Europe, with extraordinary skill and tenacity, against the distortions caused on "physical" retail by competition practiced in many ways and with shell companies from online commercial intermediation platforms.
To make the fact more understandable even to those who do not understand international law and consumer protection, the Californian sentence had originated from investigations carried out on a laptop bought on Amazon which allegedly exploded in the user's face. The final decision was this: Amazon and the other platforms are not just intermediaries, but resellers-producers of what they sell directly, with precise and in-depth knowledge of the goods they offer online.
The digital platforms – above all Amazon, to be clear – provide the gigantic mass of Asian goods with mobile numbers to which no one answers or e-mails from which no response ever arrives. Now, in the absence of an intervention by the person who supplied the goods to the e-commerce platform, the platform will be responsible for it. How did this come about in Europe too? There was no need for a new directive to replace the now inadequate e-commerce one (it would have taken decades), but for a re-interpretative update of the same.
For now, it is known that the super-experts of Baker McKenzie, an American company of law firms, with 77 offices worldwide and the third largest in terms of turnover, are working to support the EuCER (and Aires) initiative. So if the newly purchased iPhone stops working, if the washing machine explodes, if the smart TV isn't smart, if the egg cooker blends egg and kitchen, you call the cell phone of the Italian importer or the Guangzhou factory. If, as almost always happens, they do not respond, the national offices of the platform will repair the damage.
