[londons_explore]

> You can go on Ali express or similar and you will find thousands of sellers selling packaging for every imaginable brand.

Any country could simply tell AliExpress to purge all those listings from their platform. They could threaten to inspect all AliExpress packages at the border till it was done.

Inspecting all AliExpress packages (which are pretty identifyable since they all have 'null' printed on the label due to a long-standing bug) would take months for even a single days trade. That would kill AliExpress as a platform, so I'm pretty sure they'd comply.

[simonh]

I’ll give you three guesses how many shits governments give about pot heads buying crappy pot.

[TeMPOraL]

This makes me wonder, where are the lobbyists/interest groups? Local e-commerce platforms are losing non-negligible amounts of money when people are ordering on AliExpress instead of locally - surely they have every incentive to pressure their respective governments to make AliExpress orders more expensive? On the other hand, maybe they are lobbying for their cause, but all the dropshippers are lobbying even harder in favor of AliExpress?

[simonh]

That’s just an out-and-out argument for protectionism of all kinds. Local providers always want tariff and regulatory barriers against foreign competition. That doesn’t mean it’s in the general interests of customers and the economy for them to get it. It’s just a tax on you to subsidise their jobs. Why shouldn’t they pay a tax to subsidise your job?

It is more complex even than that though. Where do local e-commerce suppliers get a lot of their wares from? In a lot of cases that’s China. Why should they get to do that with no tariffs, but if you do it you get hit by tariffs? Barriers like that often end up hurting everyone.

[Wirerack]

1. No-one cares to enforce this. As always, it's usually a gray-area at best. It's not going to win any votes.

2. It would just lead to other work arounds.

[londons_explore]

Getting AliExpress to hand over a list of buyers of 1000 packs of edible bags might be a good way to audit that all those people are paying the right taxes on what they sell... Could prove pretty profitable for government!

[LargoLasskhyfv]

Would be unwise to do, if you depend on other deliveries from *.cn which maybe withold then, in the usual tit for tat deals of the so called 'free markets'.