Eric Goldman spoke with Reason.com about the SHOP SAFE Act, which threatens to obliterate online marketplaces by subjecting them to increased liability, and would make it very difficult for smaller online marketplaces to survive.
Eric Goldman, a professor of law at Santa Clara University, describes the bill as a massive invasion of privacy that could inadvertently help hackers obtain damaging information on buyers and sellers.
“This bill will kill online marketplaces and make markets less efficient,” he writes. “The net competitive effects, then, are that consumers will pay higher prices, consumers will lose their ability to find long-tail items and incur higher search costs to do so, existing market leaders will consolidate their dominant positions, and hundreds of thousands of people will lose their jobs.”
Goldman also suspects the bill would drive most if not all online marketplaces out of business, with the possible exception of Amazon.
Professor Goldman’s new paper that discusses how governmental demands for information about companies’ editorial policies can amount to censorship, was quoted by MediaPost. He was also quoted by The Register about a recent German court ruling that ad blockers altering website code is not a copyright violation, matters that were dealt decades ago by the American legal system when adware was being litigated.
