I've yet to be able to reach a human at Amazon about counterfeit items sold on the platform, and my 15+ year old Amazon account was banned from leaving reviews after I left a bad review on an Amazon Basics purchase of a surge protector that didn't do what it was supposed to and fried some of my electronics.

Yes, I would have guessed that complaining something is sold on the platform wouldn't get you very far, that's way outside the range of a typical customer support rep. They have a place to report IP infringement, and I suppose counterfeits would come under that umbrella, but it's for the rights holders only to use. Not customers who might have purchased one or noticed one listed.

For standard run of the mill customer support they're still pretty great. I was shopping for new wireless earbuds last fall and tried out a few different ones. 2 of the 3 were defective and I didn't like the third-- they hurt my ears to wear them.

For the two defective ones, I'm not sure why but the normal return button wasn't available and I had to go through chat support. I explained they were defective and I wanted to return them. They told me they'd issue the refund, no need to actually mail them back, so I didn't have to go through that hassle. And these were high end ear buds, a total of $400 worth of tech.

I have on of the not-sought-after Horowitz and Hill CE (counterfeit editions) [1]. Amazon was like, "lol, that was a marketplace purchase, no refund!" even though I just clicked "buy it now, prime shipping!" from the main product page.

Amazon sucks. It should be broken up.

[1] https://artofelectronics.net/the-book/counterfeit-editions/

Do you expect customer service representatives to evaluate your legal claim?

What a weird assumption.

I expect them to at least collect the information that I received, or suspect I have, a counterfeit item, when I go for a return. They don't even bother to do that.

I expect them to listen to my non-legal-code claim of "this is the wrong product".

I agree with you fully - it was hard to understand Kafka (as a student) until presented with half a life of examples from society.

This is basically what I think of everything I read about in English literature class in high school.

You're asked to comment on so many things that you haven't heard of. 19th century English class anxiety, extreme poverty in London, slavery and race relations in America, midcentury dystopias (global) and unreasonable justice systems in central Europe (?). All things an ordinary Scandinavian teenager at the end of the 21st century is not going to have a whole lot of perspective on until they've lived a little bit longer.

But then when you have lived that little bit longer it makes sense, and Kafka is probably the one that will come closest, having travelled quite nicely into the modern world and having a corporate version that most people will run into. Next is the dystopias that we see on the news but don't recognise when living in.

And there’s no shortage of real people defending this behavior because “they’re a private company and they can do whatever they want.”

So, if I run a website, or a service, and there are people who abuse my service, and I can't take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers...I should be forced to allow those malicious actors an account and do what?

This hypothetical glosses over an essential missing element. The site owner is in control of gating who enters into a transactional relationship with their site or service.

Offering a false dichotomy between "be forced to allow those malicious actors an[d, sic] account" and "take actions to protect myself and my other paying customers" that have adverse impacts (many times with severe monetary damages) is externalizing the cost of poor gating control in the first place in the pursuit of pumping up subscriber numbers chasing the next funding round or quarterly call to brag upon. This is similar to financial services institutions flailing around "identity theft" to cover for gating control of their transactions implemented in pursuit of transaction liquidity over security.

Both take the externalized costs out of customer hides as both uncompensated time and monies spent to make good on unwinding transactions, and in making the aggregate customers pay for the direct costs of fixing the problematic transactions on the way, way back end. Both are a result of implementing poor security practices.

Both also will not scale to the coming era of hyper-converged global financial services. First mover advantage accrues to the one who fixes this challenge at the front end where they gate the transactions, cutting out the majority of the costs of fixing this on the back end after the transaction has been compiled and deployed into production so to speak, not coincidentally speeding up settlement, increasing liquidity, and grab the significant network effects that come with establishing such an infrastructure.

Not to mention that there's a significant difference between just some website and a trillion+ dollar company with significant monopoly power in multiple markets. Being banned from Google or Amazon is simply not equivalent to being banned from commenting on some travel blog.

You can ethically take blocking actions just fine if you allow for due process. The mere existence of bans is not what's being criticized. (Though I'd say bans generally shouldn't be lifetime either.)

Talk about missing their whole point.

While we're on the subject of Kafka: I've recently listened through an audiobook of ‘The Process’, and it turned out to be a new edition. Because apparently the original order of the chapters is not known, and Max Brod took some editorial liberties—so in this new recompilation, at least some semblance of a logical ordering is attempted.

It's important, though, to not listen to the introduction for too long, because it gives away the ending.

Not when it comes to an account ban. You become a pariah to support lines.