[ISL]

"- Amazon and Walmart also have X% disallowed knife ads, but X is an extremely small percent of their overall number of items. Accounts remain active."

And the little guy, selling the same product in competition with the big guy, gets killed.

It's often better to have a level playing field.

[jordoh]

How do you level the playing field in this case? One account has 50% disallowed items (50 of 100) and another account has 0.005% disallowed items (50 of 1,000,000). You could bias _against_ large accounts by banning when they reach a fixed number of disallowed items - but then you let little guys (or any big guy that makes lots of small accounts) skate by under some arbitrary limit.

[ISL]

Agreed, unless the fixed number is zero.

You ban anyone selling banned items. I think vendors would respond quickly by self-censoring, especially the big guys.

Assisted-opening knives are a tiny fraction of Amazon's sales. If assisted-opening knife advertisements cut off Amazon's entire account, as has happened with Knife Depot, I'm pretty sure that Amazon would de-list assisted-opening knives.

A zero-tolerance policy, coupled with ample forgiveness for infractions, would be fair. Alternatively, you let anyone advertise anything.

Anything in-between turns Google into a kingmaker.

(NB - the very notion of censoring listings at all carries its own troubles, not at issue here)