reads a few web pages

I don’t know about the EU, but it looks like in the US, if Amazon is selling a product directly – as it once did for all products – it bears liability. But if it is just acting as an intermediary between a non-Amazon seller and a customer – kind of like how eBay works – it doesn’t. I assume that in that case, liability is on that seller.

Might be the same sort of situation in the EU.

I wonder if this EU directive just affects Amazon or also places like eBay. Amazon could presumably basically just sell stuff from Amazon in a worst-case scenario, but for places like eBay, I’d think that that’d have a huge impact on their business model.

EDIT: Also, if the product description is an input into liability, which I’d guess might be the case…hmm. So, right now, a non-Amazon seller selling through Amazon can write their product description. But suppose it, I don’t know, sold a given product with a description that rendered it unsafe, like selling a box of rat poison as delicious candy. The rat poison itself might be safe if it were sold as rat poison, but not in the context of being sold as food. If Amazon is liable for that description, I’d think that they wouldn’t want to permit sellers to write their own descriptions. That seems like it’d have a big impact as to how they operate.