Etsy didn't exist in 2004. The third world is much more connected now, on mobile phones.
You have the old rules more or less correct, but the spirit of them was exactly the opposite. The intention was for Etsy to serve as a (much lower cost) middleman for third world sellers. It is certainly true that Etsy hasn't lived up to its own aspirations here, as yet.
There is a backlash against the third world, but it comes from some segments of the existing US seller community. Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
>Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."
Are they actually reselling, though? There's a big gap between dog whistle racism and legitimately not wanting people to sell things they didn't make. The current rules of the site are a separate matter.
There are of course people who just put up finished goods without modification, and "reseller" is a descriptive term in those cases. That activity violates the terms, so these people eventually get banned. In my experience this is a tiny sliver of the activity that gets described as "reselling."
In other cases people assemble items from raw materials (e.g. from Alibaba) in ways that may not strike you as particularly creative, but it's kosher when it comes to the site's rules. American sellers do the same thing and have been since the site's inception. Only the Chinese folks who do it wind up in critical news articles with the "reseller" label, though.
If you see sellers described that way and they don't get banned, they have most likely gone through a documentation process whereby they explain their work with dated photos and other materials. Etsy sellers are highly motivated to flag their competition when they think there's a term violation, and real resellers don't last long.
You have the old rules more or less correct, but the spirit of them was exactly the opposite. The intention was for Etsy to serve as a (much lower cost) middleman for third world sellers. It is certainly true that Etsy hasn't lived up to its own aspirations here, as yet.
There is a backlash against the third world, but it comes from some segments of the existing US seller community. Most of the articles you see complain about "resellers," which is a catch-all term that can be basically code for "this person follows the rules, but is Chinese."