I don’t see this. The court gave a short deadline for meeting an ambiguous target with respect to a complex international logistics network. Amazon’s choices are to sloppily comply or halt until they can properly do so. They’re choosing the latter.

That keeps warehouse workers safe. And it gives Amazon time to figure out how to only ship that which the court would consider essential. The only loser is the French consumer, and they (will eventually) have other options.

Given Amazon's recent behaviors around worker protection, I expect their action here is chosen for maximum drama, an attempt to pressure the French government, and to warn other governments that they will disrupt the delivery of essential supplies if they don't get their way. So I agree with harryh; it's a middle finger.

It's been deeply disappointing to me. I've been on the fence with Amazon for a while about labor issues. But their behavior recently has crossed a line. I canceled my Prime membership yesterday. If they don't rapidly reform, it'll be the end of my 23 years as a customer.

And guess what? Halting all deliveries is the most conservative course of action possible here.

The "magic fine" were not random and unjustified. Those country were already borderline, if not fully crossing the border, with a lot of regulation here. Country like France and Germany were sick of seeing a lot of profit made within their border while tax revenue flee elsewhere.

The fine they given were not from vague plan, they were within the strict boundary of the law that those company keep playing with. Those same company are pushing for stricter and clearer regulation but are being faced with the opposition of other EU member who kind of profit from the practice of these company.

A second order effect would be the rise of a regional competitor to fill the vacuum. Then Amazon, even if they played nice, would have a hard time pushing back in to those markets, at the same time the regional competitor would, if wise, get on good terms with the EU regulatory regime and thereby give it some preferential treatment when trying to get into markets that Amazon had not vacated. A regional competitor could easily hit a tipping point and become an international one.

Long enough for the government and the people to feel the shock, but not long enough for a serious competitor to take advantage of.

No, it wouldn't. Amazon in the US is amazing compared to what Amazon is in Europe. Packages take a lot longer to arrive and the choice is much worse. There isn't even a central Amazon EU website! Yet no competitors exist. Absolutely nothing is even close to Amazon. For whatever reason, the EU market is incredibly behind in these kinds of services.

In fact, logistics over here is much better developed than the US. Most items can be next day delivered here in the UK for a low standard charge. Amazon has to offer same-day deliveries to the UK at a much higher level than the US in order to compete and maintain its competitive advantage.

Cool. What about the rest of Europe/the EU? I am in an EU country and ordering anything from any of the Amazons has a minimum delivery time of 1 week. Usually it's longer than that.

>Also digital e-commerce retailers are prevalent in all EU countries.

And they are not trustworthy. Those online retailers always have everything in stock, but after you order and pay money it always turns out that they will have to order it from somewhere else. Often that other place has no stock either. It took me almost a month to get a new HDD last year because of shenanigans like this.

>Amazon set up separate national operations in the EU due to social, regulatory and tax reasons.

This is true if you live in one of the five odd countries that have an Amazon site. The 20 other EU countries don't get this luxury.

My comment disagrees with that. To me, it's the other way around, Amazon has to do more than what they do in the US to compete over here.

So when I'm talking about getting relatively cheap next day delivery here, I'm talking about with any merchant, not just Amazon. That's why they have to offer more same-day delivery (than the US) to compete (and to justify the Prime subscription).

I'm arguing exactly about this. Yes, Amazon's doing great in the UK, but Europe does not stop at the border of the UK, France, and Germany. There are other countries there. I live in one. I explained that it's not rosy across Europe.

>So when I'm talking about getting relatively cheap next day delivery here, I'm talking about with any merchant, not just Amazon.

Great. Now what about the other few dozen European countries?

So your argument boils down to "Amazon is bad in europe, therefore no competition would arise even without Amazon"

That doesn't quite follow.

Are you saying that Amazon is the best that is possible in Europe? Even if that were the case, there's no reason an equally bad competitor couldn't fill the vacuum.

Even if I'm wrong, my point against the GGGP post stands: There wouldn't be some huge public uprising against local governments to get Amazon back if they decided to pull out.

No, I'm not saying that a competitor can't appear, I'm saying that it's unlikely, because it hasn't happened for such a long time. Of course there are other ecommerce stores but they aren't on Amazon's level.

I also agree that people wouldn't care much about it if Amazon pulled out. It would just be another way where Europe accepts worse service though. France still uses cheques to pay for some utilities (or at least they did only a few years ago).

The respectful admiration that people have in the US for big businesses and successful entrepreneurs doe not exist in France. Instead, there is the same feeling for the rebellious, for the one the fighting against big businesses, for the people.

Take a look at the Double Irish [0] and then at the Dutch Sandwich. [1]

These are accounting methods the deliberately take advantage of loops holes and arbitraging of tax regulations between jurisdictions, knowing full well some jurisdictions will take issue with it and it will be a fight.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_Irish_arrangement

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

Last pre-COVID19 example was probably Facebook trying to circumvent the idea behind GDPR by claiming their user use facebook because the _want_ advertisements and _the only way_ to provide customized advertisements is by thoroughly tracking everything the user does and therefore the they don't need any additional opt. in/out from the user. Which is both pretty much not quite true.

(In GDPR there is a clause that e.g. if you sign a contract they contract doesn't need to state that the contract will store your name provided through the required name field and similar, you still need permission if you use the name for anything but "the contract", like e.g. statistics).

What exactly is the EU protectionism in this context? It's not like member states are just coming up with laws specifically to draw fine revenue out of American companies and to prop up local competitors.

It's a cultural clash between American (and other nation's) companies pushing the envelope of a capitalism in a more socialist regulatory market.

Sadly this is true of almost every topic other than software engineering, electronics and rockets.

/s (kinda)

Oh my gosh. No.

There are countless examples of companies who have put a good faith effort into complying with laws and regulations only to have the gov't drop the hammer on them later.

And why not? Companies make good whipping boys for politicians and it's a relatively risk-free way to score political points.

Not providing an enumerated list of essential goods makes it extremely likely that no matter what Amazon stops shipping, something Amazon thought was essential is deemed non-essential and results in fines.

Deciding you can’t win isn’t throwing a temper tantrum; it’s a business decision based on likely outcomes and the profit/revenue of those outcomes.

I’d say a more correct approach would be to assess the risks associated with any decision, according to whatever framework your fiduciaries deem necessary, and then to simply disregard the casual criticism of armchair commentators as irrelevant.

For a company that is known for the one-click-buy, they definitely make it hard to cancel.

Had to go through app - website - German website ( that's a first) - "click here to cancel" ( doesn't do anything, but found something on the same page "I do not want to use my advantages" does seem to do the trick).

I kinda hate what some companies/people are currently doing though.

Also, some people are really stepping up like Bill Gates, but I don't know if it will be enough.

Like I said before...

It's not that simple. Fuzziness can be necessary to prevent bad actors from subverting the law through loopholes and to make the law applicable to future situations where it would reasonably be expected to apply. Fuzziness is also helpful to keep the law from being over-prescriptive.

For instance, if you have a copyright law you might write it to apply to any "creative work" but leave that relatively undefined and left up to interpretation by a reasonable person (i.e. a judge). You don't want movies left unprotected, because the law was unambiguously written to only apply to writings.

Similarly, you might write a law to mandate the availability of reasonable protections against infection, but you don't want the law to unambiguously require specific practices like hand-washing (because effective alternatives like hand-sanitizer didn't exist when the law was written).

Most people here are software engineers or have familiarity with software engineering, analogous situations occur around writing requirements.

Maybe in the anglo-saxon law system, this is true. In countries with napoleonic or roman law system judge's role is generally considered to be to apply the law as it is written, with the assumption that the law in most cases is sufficiently clear in itself.

I was under the impression that those Napoleonic/Roman law judges still have to interpret the law's meaning and apply it in ambiguous situations, but the difference is that their interpretations aren't binding on other judges like in the Anglo-Saxon system.

Judges in France still need to interpret laws according to what they intended to do. There's then a majority and minority opinion(s) on how that law is intepreted, and these things are set by discourse and precedence, with judges being free to decide.

In practice the difference is not so large.

This is just a flowery way of granting unchecked power to prosecutors under the theory that they'll use it in good faith. If the law is ambiguous and the prosecutor is allowed to choose an adverse interpretation in order to ensnare "bad actors" then they can really use it to ensnare anyone for anything, because everyone is technically in violation under the strict interpretation so all they have to do is decide who they don't like and charge them with the violation that everyone is technically committing. It's a complete abandonment of the rule of law.

The answer to "loopholes" is to close them, or better yet take more time to evaluate what you're doing from the start so you don't create them in the first place. Notice in particular that nearly all "loopholes" come from some combination of internal inconsistencies, unnecessary complexity or an inherent unreasonableness of the rules to begin with. (If you find yourself spending all day carving out exceptions to a rule, chances are it's a bad rule.)

> Fuzziness is also helpful to keep the law from being over-prescriptive.

This is not actually helpful because vagueness prohibits more alternatives than specificity. Overly specific rules are to be avoided, but at least then you know how to comply with them. If the rule just says "don't be bad" then you have to sit motionless and do nothing because there is no way to know what "bad" means until judgement is being passed and it's already too late not to do it.

> For instance, if you have a copyright law you might write it to apply to any "creative work" but leave that relatively undefined and left up to interpretation by a reasonable person (i.e. a judge). You don't want movies left unprotected, because the law was unambiguously written to only apply to writings.

This isn't an argument for intentional ambiguity. "Writings" was ambiguous because more than writings didn't exist when it was drafted. So it wasn't ambiguous in practice for about a hundred years. Then movies and sound recordings came to exist, there was a court case about whether they could be covered, the answer was yes, and once again the answer was unambiguous for about a hundred years since. There was only a short period between when the world changed and when the law was clarified that the answer wasn't clear. This is how you want it -- it shouldn't start off as ambiguous when it's passed and if something changes that causes it to be unclear then an interpretation should be chosen promptly so that it goes back to being unambiguous. The ambiguity is a thing to be minimized to the fullest extent practicable.

Notice also that the Copyright Act doesn't say "creative work" but rather "work fixed in a tangible medium of expression," which is much more suitable language than "creative work," because it doesn't exclude movies or VR works just because they didn't exist when the words were drafted, but at the same time it then doesn't cover abstract ideas or unrecorded expressions or inventions that should be covered by patent rather than copyright.

> Similarly, you might write a law to mandate the availability of reasonable protections against infection, but you don't want the law to unambiguously require specific practices like hand-washing (because effective alternatives like hand-sanitizer didn't exist when the law was written).

Except that then no one has any idea at all what "reasonable protections against infection" means. Does it mean washing your hands, or full hazmat gear? Does everyone have to wear the hazmat gear or only doctors? Do you have to wash your hands after every new patient or is it against the law to only do it three times a day? Does it matter if the patient evaluation indicates they're not infected?

That rule tells you nothing. It gives cover to negligent providers with good lawyers and gives cover to malicious prosecutors who then have a pretext to prosecute anybody they don't like.

> Most people here are software engineers or have familiarity with software engineering, analogous situations occur around writing requirements

This should make them more familiar with why you're wrong, because in technical writing you have similar constraints and manage to deal with them even when there is no judge to provide an ex post facto interpretation. It is necessary to be clear about what you're saying from the start.

No, it's not. In the U.S. law system, the prosecutor does not determine the boundary of what a "creative work" is. That is determined by CASE LAW, which the judge applies based upon the facts of the case. The notion that statutes can, without ambiguity, capture all that they need to is defied by the entirety of legal history.

What does this change from the perspective of the person who is trying to comply with the law? You don't know what the law makes illegal but if you do something the government doesn't like then the government will decide whether it's illegal after the fact and punish you for doing it even though they never made it clear that it was actually illegal.

> The notion that statutes can, without ambiguity, capture all that they need to is defied by the entirety of legal history.

This is still not an argument for purposeful ambiguity. The fact that absolute perfection is impossible is a lame excuse for not even trying.

Yeah, for things that are not readily apparent, you might need a lawyer to help you understand if your conduct is illegal. Have you looked up the statutory definitions for what a work is in copyright? For like 99% of people and businesses it is clear. What do you propose as an alternative? This is a pretty absurd conversation because you seem to not acknowledge the reasons for WHY the law functions this way and just posit a world that doesn't have the problems the real world does.

>This is still not an argument for purposeful ambiguity. The fact that absolute perfection is impossible is a lame excuse for not even trying.

Feel free to describe a better system. It's gotta be real though, you can't just say "a system where everything is already prescribed"... that's just fantasy

You're just talking about case law. That isn't actually any different. If something is made unambiguous by case law then it is unambiguous.

What I'm talking about are laws that a lawyer cannot tell you with a high degree of certainty what the outcome would be in court, because it was made purposely fuzzy specifically to allow the law to be retroactively interpreted adversely against anyone who draws the ire of the government.

> Feel free to describe a better system.

Here you go: In matters of statutory construction when the government is the prosecutor/regulator, the parties submit their briefs, they're read by 9 independent judges who are all told to construe the statute against the government if it's ambiguous, the judges don't get to talk to each other, the defense gets to choose which judge's interpretation to use, and that interpretation becomes precedent until the legislature changes it by statute. The government's only appeal is to the legislature (which then only applies to future cases).

Now if there is an ambiguity, it is likely to actually be construed against the government, so the government has an incentive to resolve it ahead of time whenever reasonably possible. When that isn't possible, it goes in favor of the defense in the original case and then the legislature has the opportunity to clarify what they want for future cases by passing new legislation.

No, I'm not. Statutory interpretation isn't inherently clear just because you SAY it would be. Interpreting statutes does not have to be done with an eye towards previous cases. It can be done in a vacuum, as I pointed out to you in another thread - that's how it works in civil law. Even in common law, the factual circumstances of a case dictate whether or not precedential cases are relevant. Nevertheless... there is an INTERPRETATION LAYER.

>What I'm talking about are laws that a lawyer cannot tell you with a high degree of certainty what the outcome would be in court, because it was made purposely fuzzy specifically to allow the law to be retroactively interpreted adversely against anyone who draws the ire of the government.

Ok - give an example of such a law...

> Here you go: In matters of statutory construction when the government is the prosecutor/regulator, the parties submit their briefs, they're read by 9 independent judges who are all told to construe the statute against the government if it's ambiguous, the judges don't get to talk to each other, the defense gets to choose which judge's interpretation to use, and that interpretation becomes precedent until the legislature changes it by statute.

You are suggesting that a defendant get to set precedent merely based upon their own selection. You are aware that, save for that, this exactly how the appeals circuit functions?

Like, I'd be happy to have this conversation genuinely with you, but you clearly have no experience in the legal world. Ambiguity is ALWAYS construed against the government and it's a foundational principal of our legal system. It seems more like the problem is your own ignorance, not how the law actually functions.

Also, it seems like you do not understand the distinction between civil courts in the united states and criminal courts.

He's basically saying "the US law is fuzzy because there are lawyers, whereas in other systems there are only judges" which really fails to understand the different systems of law in two key ways.

1) As I described, the US system is not actually fuzzy. Pretending there is a legal system that only "just applies the law" that does not have a 'reasonableness' layer is factually incorrect. It is also factually incorrect to say that the prosecutor determines whether or not the law is violated. It's obviously not true and it reflects a tremendous misunderstanding of the adversarial legal system. In this system, the differing sides argue for their interpretation and application of the law to the facts of the case. The judge, in hearing their arguments, makes determinations along a set of guidelines as to HOW THE LAW APPLIES TO THE FACTS. That is to say, the complete opposite of what this OP described. In the US system, the JUDGES APPLY THE LAW.

2) In non-adversarial systems, what the judge does is more than "just apply the law". The judge performs the roles of the adversarial sides, just within the judge's head. The judge determines, based upon his own belief (and I'm sure, some guidelines) what either side would argue, and from there, applies the law to the facts of the case to determine outcomes. This is why it is factually incorrect to suggest this system is in any way more or less fuzzy. If a system simply just "applied the law" without any regard to the debate of the factual circumstances of the case, there would be no need for JUDGMENT.

"Civil law" is too restrictive a term for what you mean, and there certainly is a direct analogue to case law precedent.

Civil law ("droit civil") is simply the part of the law of France that deals with personal matters including contracts between private (non-state) entities; marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, and other family matters; landlord-tenant and other private property matters. The broader private law ("droit privé") includes employer-employee law, commercial sales law (advertising, warranty, and so forth), insurance law, shipping and transport law, manufacturing law (standards and practices) and so forth.

Public law ("droit public") includes criminal law ("code pénal"), constitutional law (which defines public bodies and their broad responsibilities especially with respect to human rights), and administrative law (which governs the powers of public bodies and provides recourse for adverse decisions and other private-party claims against such bodies).

Both types of law are codified in regularly-updated statute, and there are some eighty extant codes.

The codes are binding on all the courts, and a goal of the process of revision is to make the codes sufficiently comprehensive that they apply to practically all cases. Where codes are insufficient, the courts must of course make practical decisions anyway, and there they are bound by jurisprudence constante -- matters not yet codified should be as in accord with the code as possible, and subsequent decisions in similar circumstances should aim to be in accord, with a view to making it easy to amend the code.

Appeals decisions in France do not bind all the courts below in common to the ratio of the appeals court judgment. This is the "common" part of common law: it binds all the courts within the same jurisdiction, with statute overriding other sources of law. In France, the statutory codes are the overriding source of law, but all courts are bound to aim for predictable, stable justice, even if that (seemingly paradoxically) means disagreeing with a previous judgment of a senior court. The Court of Cassation in France reviews questions of law and procedure, with the goal of ensuring that the interpretation of the law is uniform throughout France. This is somewhat like restricting itself to dealing with "circuit splits" in the United States's federal court system, but not driven by the facts of the cases in question as opposed to whether the code was applied at all, and what was done to maintain jurisprudence constante.

In common law jurisdictions, typically one typically must "distinguish" a case in a lower court from a precedent set by a higher court, and hope that the distinguishing is either not appealed or survives on appeal. However, in the French system, when faced with a series of similar cases and an argument that this forms jurisprudence constante, one may still persuade the court that an exception is justifiable. The most important difference is that one decision by a higher court can trigger a requirement to distinguish in common-law systems, whereas in French law formally only the codes themselves are binding in the strict sense.

Note that there are codes in many common-law jurisdictions, examples include the Criminal Code of Canada, the Uniform Commercial Code in the USA, and so forth. These consolidate into single codes what historically (and still in England & Wales; Scotland has a much more Roman law system than E&W) appears scattered across several Acts of the legislature. However, even in England & Wales statutes are updated from time to time to reflect results in the courts; most common-law jurisdictions have some form of law commission which proposes amendments (and sometimes consolidations) to the legislature to effect this in a non-partisan manner. This is almost exactly how the codes in French law and similar systems are updated over time, too.

While there are surface differences between French law and Irish law (which is similar to English law for historical reasons), statute law -- the codes, in essence -- have been converging as the European Union has evolved. Consequently, I think there is an argument that the main difference between the system of (non-constitutional) law in the USA (and the several states) and the system of (non-constitutional) law in France is in the historical policy choices of the respective legislatures, and the differences in political and legal cultures. There are sharp differences between the political and legal cultures of the USA and England and Wales, or Canada, too, and these bubble up into the judiciaries rather than being driven by them.

I don't think you have a very good understanding of the US legal system. Caselaw consists of interpretations of laws made after (sometimes long after) those laws came into force. It's a reflection of the inherent ambiguity and fuzziness in any body of law.

Law isn't like computer code. While there may be some philosophical appeal to the idea of a law code that's unambiguous and requires no judgement to interpret or apply, such a goal is actually impractical and undesirable.

I know it's tough being wrong on the internet, but just the L on this one.

By this I mean we don't know how to make such a system practical without ambiguity. Not that people haven't tried.

The court gave a short deadline because it should have been done a while ago already. Let's not pretend like it's a surprise.

The government asked to stop any non-vital activity a month ago. Amazon, instead of interpreting this as: let's reduce our activity to just the part that qualifies as vital (vital for the country, not vital for Amazon margins), interpreted this as: since we ship some vital stuff, all of our activity is vital, and can proceed like business as usual. This is just a usual greedy move where profit comes before health of the employees.

It’s hard to cast Amazon as the villain here if France won’t provide a clear definition of vital.

Off the top of my head they could use Amazon and Google’s product taxonomy to explicitly identify categories that are allowed/not which would scope this further down to a, still challenging, classification and content moderation problem.

Read the shutdown orders, they will clarify this sort of stuff.

Vital goods are goods that are necessary for human life, shelter, and the operation of businesses that have been declared vital. (Which are thoroughly enumerated in most shutdown orders).

Most of Amazon's business, by that definition, ships vital goods. I don't think any western country has so far discriminated between vital goods going to vital businesses, versus non-vital household use, so most of their business is permissable...

I develop software and systems in an almost pure R&D environment and all of my current project work is, as far as citizens in this country are concerned, non-essential, yet my employer blasts almost daily emails that play semantic gymnastics as more and more lockdown requirements were/are issued by states and municipalities that (surprise) are construed by management that everyone is "essential" through a long drawn out and highly questionable argument.

It's comical to watch greed try and define essential because for greedy behavior: money is essential. They'll wiggle around definitions and policies all day as much as they can to limit shutting down their revenue streams.

This isn't logical. When you order someone to comply with something, you give them the amount of time it takes to do the task. If you want to punish them - fine them. Ordering them to do something impossible and then criticising them for failing is just intentionally setting them up to fail.

...so the only logical response is for them to suspend operations.

The French state didn't issue a mere suggestion a month ago, it was an order. The court just upheld the order. Amazon had the entire month to prepare.

If Amazon cannot comply with the order in the time NOW given, then their only alternative is to suspend operations.

Whether or not they wasted time in the past, is irrelevant at this point.

I wasn't arguing that they should or should not close, I simply responded to OP comment that they didn't have enough time to comply, while they in fact had that time (not anymore).

Is toilet paper vital and necessary? One person may say no and other may say yes!

What about cheese? What about mop? There are literally millions of items, each of which would need to be cleared with a lawyer now.

Why would you do that? Especially if other retailers don’t have to comply with a similar order.

I also do not believe the french state would bother Amazon because Amazon included toilet paper in their list while it's not on France's list. It's the complete inaction and not acting in good faith that has prompted the state to take action against them.

Everyone in the world is trying to meet an ambiguous target. You know what happened to all the small businesses in my neighborhood? They are closed until further notice.

Amazon employs an underclass (warehouse workers) that we all expect to risk their lives for our comfort. French court said: "non". Good for them.

They are not, but they are aiming at leveraging their near-monopoly status to create public outrage against the decision. What else would motivate their decisions to forego profit on the allowed product categories? I am assuming we are all intelligent adults here, no need to spell out everything...

You can say what you want about Amazon, but they always take the long-term view when it comes to profits.

Let's look at the situation. First, there's the added cost of complying. Second, there's a risk that even with a good faith attempt, they would not be able to comply, and thus there could be fines. Third, by restricting what can be sold, the order may have diminished Amazon's revenue and profits. So it could very well be that under the order it is not profitable for Amazon to operate its warehouses in France.

> They are not, but they are aiming at leveraging their near-monopoly status to create public outrage against the decision.

Maybe it's a bad decision with bad consequences, and that is what would cause any outrage. Maybe there won't be any outrage after all, since the French apparently have solidarity with the workers in these warehouses? I don't see any evidence that Amazon is artificially inflating their response to generate outrage.

In New Zealand, which is still under full lockdown, supermarkets and dairies still sell wine and beer.

Source: A friend of mine, who lives in Paris and is into wine.

According to the article, Amazon had a month and didn't get its act together, and this is the follow-up action by the court.

ambiguous target

Says Amazon. Amazon doesn't say what was ambiguous.

with respect to a complex international logistics network

You don't get to endanger people's lives just because you're a big company operating in multiple markets. Plus, Amazon isn't exactly hurting for money.

And if we're being intellectually honest here, you can't even "sloppily" comply with ambiguous targets.

“Our interpretation suggests that we may be forced to suspend the activity of our distribution centers in France,” Amazon said in a statement. “The court gave categories that are very general and create ambiguity that would be too hard to implement, this is a complex business to run,” a spokeswoman for Amazon told Bloomberg.

Amazon isn’t able to reduce its activity and must shut down completely “because of the terms and conditions of the court order, especially because of their ambiguity and the absence of definition,” the e-commerce giant said in an internal memo that was seen by Bloomberg. The company will suspend activity at its fulfillment centers for an “initial period” of five days starting on April 16, it said.

5 days, with 100% of their pay btw. That does not sound like a "threat" to me. Why frame it as such?

This headline could have easily been written as "Amazon states it may suspend French deliveries ..." but that doesn't portray Amazon as negatively as the author wanted. Amazon is meant to be the villain in this article.

If the deadline was, say, 1 week, then I'd agree that it seems like a fair demand.

If they're not happy, they can leave. It's not like we don't have other (law complying) marketplaces.

Now people complain that they are sending them home

Amazon is just todays "big evil corporation" and nothing they do will be "correct"

AFAICT the only people complaining are the ones complaining that Amazon shouldn't have to protect their employees.

The courts ordered them to meet an unrealistic bar, so the only way to comply with the court order is to shut down for a week.

This is what the judge ordered. If the judge didn’t want to create artificial shortages during a crisis, they should have thought more carefully before deciding the case. Note that Amazon’s appealing the ruling, so hopefully the judge will be overruled.

Mission impossible really.

So court had set them up to break the law.

Amazon doesn't do anything wrong here. If it can't improve in a month, surely it can't improve in 24 hours.

If they couldn't comply, why won't they say why? Which parts of the rules are arbitrary and difficult to comply with?

>Which one seems like a smarter response?

Amazon's response seems reasonable to me, under the circumstances. Your characterization of their response is unfair.

I do, however, think it serves as a signal to the French courts that rulings of this sort can have unintended consequences, and perhaps more care should be taken: 24 hours is not a reasonable deadline for such an undertaking. It seems strange the court did not enter into a dialogue about how long changes would take: It is an obvious issue that would need to be addressed. Had they done so, the court, rather than Amazon, could have decided what happens in the interim before a reduction to "essentials" could be implemented.

I doubt they could comply with significantly upping their product control.

Bottom line, based on the little that was in the article, if coronavirus shows up in your facility despite your doubled down efforts you're still liable. A court of law is a court of law in the US. The liability would be with you. Again, maybe there was some more clear instruction given? But if not, there's a lot of rope there to hang yourself with. Best to just stop doing business in that jurisdiction. At least until you have a better idea what's going on.