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Court rules grocery store's inaccessible website isn't an ADA violation:
A federal appeals court struck a significant blow against disability rights this week when it ruled that a Florida grocery store's inaccessible website did not violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. The ruling contradicts a 2019 decision by a different appeals court holding that Domino's did violate the ADA when it failed to make its app accessible to blind people.
[...] Winn-Dixie is a grocery store chain with locations across the American South. Juan Carlos Gil is a blind Florida man who patronized Winn-Dixie stores in the Miami area for about 15 years.
A few years ago, Gil learned that the store offered customers the ability to fill prescriptions online. Ordering online saves customers time because prescriptions are ready when the customer arrives. Gill also preferred to order prescriptions online because it offered greater privacy. In court, he testified that ordering in person as a blind man made him "uncomfortable because he did not know who else was nearby listening" as he told the pharmacist his order.
Unfortunately, the Winn-Dixie website was incompatible with the screen-reading software Gil used to surf the web, rendering it effectively useless to him. Incensed, Gil stopped patronizing Winn-Dixie and filed a lawsuit under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Gil argued that the inaccessible design of the Winn-Dixie website discriminated against blind customers like him because it forced them to order prescriptions in person, a process that is slower and offers less privacy.
In his lawsuit, Gil also said he couldn't access two other features of the Winn-Dixie website: a store locator function and the ability to clip digital coupons and automatically apply them at the register with his loyalty card.
[...] The ruling runs directly contrary to a 2019 decision by the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court, which covers California and several other Western states. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit ruled that Domino's had violated the ADA by failing to make its online ordering system accessible to blind customers. Plaintiff Guillermo Robles claimed that this violated his rights under the ADA, and the Ninth Circuit agreed.
[...] Hence, while the website itself might not be a place of public accommodation, an inaccessible website impedes blind customers' access to the Domino's restaurant—which clearly is such a place.
This situation—where two different appeals courts take divergent positions on the same legal question—is known as a circuit split. For now, businesses in Western states will be required to follow the Ninth Circuit's broad interpretation of the ADA and make their websites accessible. Meanwhile, businesses in the three Eleventh Circuit states—Alabama, Georgia, and Florida—won't have to worry as much about making their websites ADA compliant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @04:05PM (3 children)
A functionally free market is one in which market participants are at liberty to make their own choices, as opposed to a command economy in which choices are imposed by a planning structure of some sort. This does not preclude regulation or enforcement of things like contract law or fair trading rules either.
Describing it as a fantasy of economists is to turn your back on pretty much the whole of the twentieth century's work on economics.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:35PM (2 children)
No, that's just a market economy.
A functionally free market is one where no individual buyer or seller, nor any consortium of them, holds enough market power to be able to unilaterally influence the market price of goods.
Without that, it's a captive market which no longer adheres to the assumptions made about a free market, and is unlikely to deliver the benefits normally ascribed to them.
A free market is an economist model much akin to a physicist's spherical cow in a vacuum. It's a useful simplification for some classes of thought experiments, but is not directly relevant to the real world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @05:46PM (1 child)
Antitrust/scale management regulations are a normal part of regulation. The 19th century called, and it wants its conception of normal market regulation back. In particular, if you preclude the very notion of a consortium agreeing to collective action, you run into the problem of how a consortium could be constituted, how they'd be organised and how to identify them. In principle, any free market's participants could collude to shove the market around by combining their numbers to corner a market - labour activists call it collective bargaining and solidarity.
If you're going to define it out of existence, then sure, no such thing exists but back in the real world where real people talk about real economies, a free market comes down to participants freely engaging in offer/acceptance exchanges based on mutually agreeable terms.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Immerman on Tuesday April 13 2021, @06:30PM
> In principle, any free market's participants could collude to shove the market around by combining their numbers to corner a market - labour activists call it collective bargaining and solidarity.
Yes, they could - at which point it would stop being a free market.
In practice, some commodity markets are diversified enough to approximate a free market; however, most products are not remotely diversified enough - I believe I've heard that once on actor (or group) corners just 10% of a market, that market will no longer behave as a free market.
> free market comes down to participants freely engaging in offer/acceptance exchanges based on mutually agreeable terms.
Again - that's true of *any* market, not just a free market. The alternative is something like the command economy you mention, which is NOT market-based.
All of the benefits ascribed to a free market are not magically present in just any market-based economy, only in a free market where no individual or group has enough power to influence market prices. Which is to say, they are not especially relevant to any real market, aside from the most diversified commodities.