Multiple court rulings have found Amazon responsible for defects in products sold by third-party merchants

From the article:

[...] Bolger’s case, and a handful of others in Texas, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania have halted Amazon’s winning streak. And legislation that was under debate this week in California aimed to place liability squarely on e-commerce retailers that provide a platform for dubious merchants selling dangerous goods.

Bolger’s case and others in California led to a first-of-its-kind bill that would have extended rules that apply in the physical world to electronic commerce. The bill, which Democratic Assemblyman Mark Stone pulled late Friday as the legislative session neared its end, called for holding online marketplaces liable for the products they sell, just as retailers can be held responsible for goods purchased in their brick-and-mortar stores.

Surprisingly, Amazon supported the measure, with one condition: the company wanted the law to apply to all online marketplaces, including its competitors who, for example, do not warehouse and ship products sold by third-party merchants. That drew intense opposition from several Amazon rivals, including Etsy, whose chief executive, Josh Silverman, wrote in a blog post that the measure will saddle small businesses with “complex, hard-to-comply-with legislation that only they can afford to absorb.”