The Anti-Gray Market Alliance, an association of mostly IT hardware vendors, has introduced a web drop for snitches, where "consumers and business customers can now quickly report incidences of suspected fraudulent sales, illegal brokering or counterfeit goods".

This is a most peculiar definition of the grey market, the estimated worth of which is approx. $20bn globally a year, according to the AGMA. What has "illegal brokering" got to do with "counterfeit goods". And why is parallel trading "illegal"?

When the AGMA launched last September we wrote:

The grey market is a: a valuable safety valve for component makers, disties and resellers, that have miscalculated on inventory and b: good for consumers. By imposing restrictive distribution practices, vendors seek to make customers pay higher prices than would otherwise be the case. We hope the AGMA fails.

Our opinion hasn't changed.

Related stories

Vendors beat up on grey market
This is what Microsoft said about grey imports in 1998