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| Hubert Robert: Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines |
The greatest challenge the internet faces isn't what it can make happen. It's what it can stop happening. And right now, it's not stopping enough from happening.
The online world has become one in which deceit and deception are running riot and out of control. Caught in the middle of the cross-fire, businesses and brands are under pressure from fraud and regulation simultaneously.
Increasingly, the only way to gain advantage online is to cheat. If you are a business that plays fair and by the rules, it is increasingly difficult and costly to win online.
We have a perverse situation emerging in which legitimate businesses are having to spend millions to defend their businesses on the internet, while armies of digital pirates are cheating their way to win online sales. The internet has become a new Wild West for fake goods, fake sellers and now fake reviews. This descent into online anarchy threatens business and society alike.
Against this tide of trickery we have a thing called the General Data Protection Regulation or GDPR. Compliance with this has been estimated to cost every legitimate business an average of $100,000. Few will risk non-compliance as penalties for so doing are 4% of annual global turnover or €20m, whichever is greater. Six years in the making, GDPR perfectly illustrates the ineffectiveness of conventional law-making to tackle the problems that the digital world creates. It's like the cops arriving in town six years after the bank has been robbed.
Instead of creating a level playing field in which free, fair and open competition is supported, the internet is creating its own distorted markets where caveat emptor is a more vital consumer watchword than ever before.
This is a far cry from what the original internet visionaries had in mind. The open, transparent and fair digital marketplaces their dreams envisioned are manifesting instead as nasty neighborhoods full of muggers and criminals. And even the boundaries between the good and the bad guys are getting blurred.
So what’s my evidence?
I could cite dozens of examples to evidence my assertion, but to save space, here's just one more or less random case.
In December 2017, the boss of German shoe brand Birkenstock accused Amazon of a failure to tackle fraudulent sellers flogging cheap knock-off versions of its sandals. Chief Executive, Oliver Reichert accused Amazon of acting as "an accomplice" to sellers of cheap copies of their sandals. He said, "The truth is that Amazon makes money with these fakes. As far we're concerned, Amazon is an accomplice."
Birkenstock terminated its business relations with Amazon's European website on January 1, 2018 because of "a series of violations of the law on the marketplace platform". Reichert said: "If you sell dodgy merchandise on your market place, you have to answer for that."
Guess what? There’s an app for that…
Several entrepreneurial businesses recognised early on that the growth of online business would inevitably create numerous marketplaces where an independent measure of product quality and customer satisfaction would be beneficial to businesses and consumers alike.
Businesses like Trustpilot recognised the opportunity and soon established themselves. And platforms such as Amazon, Ebay and Trip Advisor promptly integrated their own customer rating systems so that consumers could see independent opinions from other buyers.
Sounds good in principal, but in practice, these systems are just not working. They are being gamed on a massive scale. Some US analysts estimate that half of the reviews for certain products posted on websites such as Amazon are fake.
"Sellers are trying to game the system and there's a lot of money on the table," said Tommy Noonan, who runs ReviewMeta, a website that analyses online reviews. "If you can rank number one for, say, bluetooth headsets and you're selling a cheap product, you can make a lot of money," he said.
Three quarters of UK adults use online reviews and almost half believe they have seen fake reviews, according to a survey of 1,500 UK residents conducted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The government's Competition and Markets Authority estimate such reviews influence £23 billion of UK customer spending every year.
Fake Amazon reviews are being openly traded on the internet.
The BBC found online forums where Amazon shoppers are offered full refunds in exchange for product reviews. The platforms are well aware that such fakery is going on, but evidently have not managed to eliminate it.
In 2016, Amazon introduced a range of measures to combat what it called "incentivised reviews". Instead of solving the problem, this effectively drove it underground, leading to the emergence of Facebook groups where people were encouraged to buy a product on Amazon and post a favourable review in exchange for a full refund.
This is the insidious nature of the online economy – controls recognise a problem and clamp down, only for it to adapt, reconfigure and re-emerge elsewhere in the system.
Amazon says:
"We do not permit reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment. Customers and Marketplace sellers must follow our review guidelines and those that don't will be subject to action including potential termination of their account."
Fair enough, but no policy such as this will deter those who can gain from breaching it. They simply increase the sophistication of their deceit. This is a war which the platforms and brands are not winning because the stakes are just too high, the available remedies too feeble and the villains too fast moving.
In the final irony, can Trustpilot be gamed too?
Responding to adverts posted on eBay, the BBC was also able to purchase a false 5-star review on Trustpilot. Trustpilot say they are “committed to being the most trusted online review community on the market. We have specialist software that screens reviews against 100's of data points around the clock to automatically identify and remove fakes”. I can be committed to anything I choose, but that commitment doesn't make it manifest. If even Trustpilot can be gamed, that's like vote rigging worthy of a rogue state.
In December 2017, the boss of German shoe brand Birkenstock accused Amazon of a failure to tackle fraudulent sellers flogging cheap knock-off versions of its sandals. Chief Executive, Oliver Reichert accused Amazon of acting as "an accomplice" to sellers of cheap copies of their sandals. He said, "The truth is that Amazon makes money with these fakes. As far we're concerned, Amazon is an accomplice."
Birkenstock terminated its business relations with Amazon's European website on January 1, 2018 because of "a series of violations of the law on the marketplace platform". Reichert said: "If you sell dodgy merchandise on your market place, you have to answer for that."
Guess what? There’s an app for that…
Several entrepreneurial businesses recognised early on that the growth of online business would inevitably create numerous marketplaces where an independent measure of product quality and customer satisfaction would be beneficial to businesses and consumers alike.
Businesses like Trustpilot recognised the opportunity and soon established themselves. And platforms such as Amazon, Ebay and Trip Advisor promptly integrated their own customer rating systems so that consumers could see independent opinions from other buyers.
Sounds good in principal, but in practice, these systems are just not working. They are being gamed on a massive scale. Some US analysts estimate that half of the reviews for certain products posted on websites such as Amazon are fake.
"Sellers are trying to game the system and there's a lot of money on the table," said Tommy Noonan, who runs ReviewMeta, a website that analyses online reviews. "If you can rank number one for, say, bluetooth headsets and you're selling a cheap product, you can make a lot of money," he said.
Three quarters of UK adults use online reviews and almost half believe they have seen fake reviews, according to a survey of 1,500 UK residents conducted by the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The government's Competition and Markets Authority estimate such reviews influence £23 billion of UK customer spending every year.
Fake Amazon reviews are being openly traded on the internet.
The BBC found online forums where Amazon shoppers are offered full refunds in exchange for product reviews. The platforms are well aware that such fakery is going on, but evidently have not managed to eliminate it.
In 2016, Amazon introduced a range of measures to combat what it called "incentivised reviews". Instead of solving the problem, this effectively drove it underground, leading to the emergence of Facebook groups where people were encouraged to buy a product on Amazon and post a favourable review in exchange for a full refund.
This is the insidious nature of the online economy – controls recognise a problem and clamp down, only for it to adapt, reconfigure and re-emerge elsewhere in the system.
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| Pandora by John William Waterhouse, 1896 |
"We do not permit reviews in exchange for compensation of any kind, including payment. Customers and Marketplace sellers must follow our review guidelines and those that don't will be subject to action including potential termination of their account."
Fair enough, but no policy such as this will deter those who can gain from breaching it. They simply increase the sophistication of their deceit. This is a war which the platforms and brands are not winning because the stakes are just too high, the available remedies too feeble and the villains too fast moving.
In the final irony, can Trustpilot be gamed too?
Responding to adverts posted on eBay, the BBC was also able to purchase a false 5-star review on Trustpilot. Trustpilot say they are “committed to being the most trusted online review community on the market. We have specialist software that screens reviews against 100's of data points around the clock to automatically identify and remove fakes”. I can be committed to anything I choose, but that commitment doesn't make it manifest. If even Trustpilot can be gamed, that's like vote rigging worthy of a rogue state.
So I'll say again - the greatest test the internet faces isn't what it can make happen. It's what it can stop happening.
Consumers are being conned. Brands are being hijacked. Online marketplaces are being corrupted. Internet markets are not delivering their promises. And the war on this banditry is being lost. This is not so much the Wild West where a marshall’s posse would hunt down the miscreants, it’s more like a digital Mafia state.
And GDPR will do absolutely nothing to deter even the smallest gangs of bandits.
Consumers are being conned. Brands are being hijacked. Online marketplaces are being corrupted. Internet markets are not delivering their promises. And the war on this banditry is being lost. This is not so much the Wild West where a marshall’s posse would hunt down the miscreants, it’s more like a digital Mafia state.
And GDPR will do absolutely nothing to deter even the smallest gangs of bandits.
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