1997

July, 1997. P&G filed a second, and more serious suit against Amway. The significant charge in the second suit is that Amway is running an illegal pyramid scheme.

December, 1997. Schwartz decided, for reasons clearly stated on his web site, to remove most of his site from the internet. He did this because he felt he was being harassed and intimidated by Amway Corporation, and while confident that Amway had no basis for a lawsuit, did not want to put his family through such an ordeal. He removed his site and left only his explanation and a group of e-mail letters he received from site visitors.

The reaction among people sympathetic to Schwartz' message was swift and immediate. Within days of the shutdown, "mirror sites" had sprung up all over the world, with the complete content of his site now viewable from URLs in Hong Kong, Japan, Finland, Australia, and a number of North American locations.

Amway responded quickly. A number of the mirror site owners, including the ones in Japan and Finland, received an e-mail purporting to be from a Mark Cornillie, who signed himself 'Senior Administrator - External Affairs Amway Corporation.' The bodies of these letters were identical, as far as we've been able to determine, and read:

I'm writing to ask if we could talk regarding your Web site. As you can guess, we're quite concerned about comments you have made about our business and your duplication of Mr. Schwartz's site.

I hope that by communicating directly with you, I can address some of your questions and concerns. I also hope you will listen to our views and give them fair consideration.

Please feel free to e-mail me at external_affairs@Amway.com. I will be in and out of the office during the next week, but promise to get back to you quickly if I'm not immediately available. Until then, following is a statement regarding Amway's position on Free Speech and the Internet. Thank you,

Mark Cornillie
Senior Administrator - External Affairs
Amway Corporation

Then followed Amway's complete "Amway Statements. . ." message just as it appeared on their web site.

Responses to the Cornillie letter bounced back, with messages about a nonexistent address. I posted the complete text of Cornillie's letter, and a copy of the error message I received when I tried to respond, on my web site. On December 19, a second e-mail arrived from Cornillie.

I am writing to confirm that indeed we are interested in communicating with you directly. I believe that the problem you had in contacting me was the result of a system problem we had yesterday. I hope you will try again. If you continue to have problems with the reply button, make sure that the address listed is external_affairs@amway.com

Please be assured that we communicate with the best of intentions. It is our sincere hope that by opening a dialogue, a better understanding can be achieved on both our parts. As such, I ask that you not misread any further technical glitches that may happen and correct the conjecture on your current site.

Best regards and Happy Holidays

Mark Cornillie
Amway Corporation

I posted this letter on my site as well, along with a statement that if Amway would only enforce its own distributor rules, there would be nothing we needed to discuss. I heard nothing further from Amway, nor did the other mirror site owners I checked with. Attempts to verify independently that the e-mail had actually come from Amway were unsuccessful.

December 19, Amway Vice President Ken MacDonald sent out an Amvox message to North American distributor leaders. In that Amvox message, MacDonald stated:

We'v hired consultants and been working very diligently on all of the secret computer language that helps the search engines pick a site and because of that we've moved the positive Amway sites quite a bit up in the web search engines, and some of the negative sites down. And lastly, that we are working to provide very soon, for all those who qualified Emeralds and above who want it their own personal homepage so we will have tons of positive Amway information on the web.

The "secret computer language" MacDonald refers to is the metatags, invisible tags in the headers of web pages, which several search engines use to locate and index web pages.

Soon after this, a distributor who sent an e-mail to Amway questioning material in a web site received an answer from Amway Distributor Relations stating, in part, that "unfortunately" free speech must be permitted on the internet.