The same holds true for getting an affiliate's account banned because the links to Amazon still work and customers can purchase items using affiliate links, the affiliate just receives no credit for the traffic. In the end it's the freeman who is harmed and not the lord because the freeman must still pay rent to lord even if he has no crop to sell at market. It's like destroying a freeman's crop because the lord failed to secure the land. I would agree that it's equally bad to harm both an affiliate or a merchant's staff just to bring attention to an issue with the merchant. We were discuss the ethics of harming an affiliate to gain the attention of a merchant, not about harming the merchant or it's staff. My point was that merchants using the platform being hurt is no more important than staff supporting the platform being hurt, and that we can't simply abide evil 'kings' just because some of their voluntary supporters would lose their privileges (or even be actually hurt) if we stopped them. It was meant as an imperfect analogy to their social relationships, as they actually exist, by drawing on our knowledge of older social relationships, ie, the relationship is closer to a manor owner serving a liege than a tennant in a firetrap, because of the willful support of their business practices, that they are receiving benefits from their service, and the (mostly) voluntary nature of their association. Rather, my comment was that a useful conceptual model for understanding a corporation and its supporting players is feudalism, though there are obvious differences, such as that a 'manor' can be picked up and moved to another 'kingdom', or even serve two 'kingdoms' at once. Well, I actually do think some kinds of neo-feudalism would be interesting experiments for city or county level governments, with an overarching government based around republicanism (and is probably closer to reality than we like to admit), but that wasn't what my comment was about, at all.

I think in hindsight we made the mistake of not trying to publicize the issue and Amazon could just ignore it. And now my wife is now on a 'refuse to respond' to list for trying to contact them multiple times to get someone who can apply a little bit of reason to the situation. But because of this, Amazon suspended over $500 of earnings, and killed a site that took many months to build and establish. The person who had shared the link was obviously even a legitimate reddit user, and the post was pretty minor only getting a few upvotes (we only found it via a search). Because reddit is a site you are not allowed to share affiliate links, Amazon suspended the account. Someone had clicked on her affiliate link, then copy and pasted it onto reddit to share the Amazon product with some people (without knowing it had the affiliate link as ?tag=.). It took quite a while to piece together, but after about 4 or 5 back and forths, we figured out what happened. Something similar happened to my wife as an Amazon affiliate.

Amazon kindle account revoked by amazon