Citing a lack of compliance with product safety and recall laws, France is ordering online search engines and other resources to eliminate U.S. e-commerce marketplace wish.com from their listings.

The realities of internet commerce are such that the government cannot effectively “ban” the marketplace. However, the French Minister for Economic Affairs Bruno Le Maire has ordered Internet search engines (Google, for example), to scrub wish.com from search results offered to French consumers.

French government research showed that the vast majority of goods available via wish.com did not comply with French or European safety standards. For example, it found about 90 per cent of evaluated electrical appliances and 45 per cent of toys were dangerous. It noted that while wish.com was generally responsive to specific requests to remove unsafe items, other similar unsafe items with slightly different product identifiers remained on the site.

The U.S. site indicated it would take legal action to prevent the move, noting it had always met demands to pull unsafe items, but does not have a legal obligation to conduct controls of the 150 million products sold through its platform. A Reuters report noted that the French action was designed to signal the European Union’s draft Digital Services Act would hold technology firms to higher standards.

In some respects, France’s action is similar to recent U.S. initiatives by safety regulator Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) to require Amazon to force recalls of defective products sold through its “Fulfilled by Amazon” facility by third-party sellers. The CPSC action may bring clarity to the question of who is responsible when a product bought through Amazon but provided by a third-party seller hurts a purchaser. The CPSC has limited ability to force a recall of foreign-manufactured products, but has taken the position that regulating Amazon’s conduct is integral to consumer safety, and that Amazon is a distributor of consumer products under federal law. If the CPSC action is successful, Amazon would be required to undertake future mandatory recalls on behalf of its sellers.

Perhaps more significantly, having Amazon declared a distributor would challenge common defences used by other tech leaders such as Facebook and Google, which claim they are not responsible for what’s posted or sold through their platforms. In August, Amazon announced it would pay customers who suffer injuries or property damage from defective goods sold by others on its U.S. platform.

In Canada, regulatory efforts in online marketplaces seem more focused on pricing than safety. Canada’s Competition Bureau began a review in 2020 that focuses on whether the online retail giant’s pricing practices impact competition to the detriment of consumers. The Canadian effort, emphatically called an investigation with “no conclusion of wrongdoing”, is similar to a number of U.S. state-level suits under anti-trust law.