Caveat emptor

(Upstart) I think it’s safe to assume that most everyone who buys stuff online has gotten ripped off once or twice; Lord knows I’ve had my own share of misgivings over eBay transactions gone bad. (Of course, I probably should have realized that genuine Faberge eggs aren’t made of rich chocolate with a creamy nougat center before I sent out that money order, but still…) The blessing of e-commerce is also its curse: You can buy anything online—think of the guy trying to auction off one of his kidneys, or that kid offering his virginity to the highest bidder. But whether it’s a copy of Action Comics number one bearing a curiously anachronistic advertisement for the new Backstreet Boys album or a draft of the Constitution signed by the heretofore-unknown statesman Richard Hertz, the message is the same: Buyer beware.

The stakes are immeasurably higher right now in a Birmingham, England courtroom, where a Welsh couple is battling for custody of six-month-old American twins they adopted over the Internet. Dubbed the “baby trade couple” by the legendarily sensitive British tabloid press, Peter and Judith Kilshaw paid $12,000 to a California adoption service, A Caring Heart, for custody of the children; challenging their claims are Richard and Vickie Allen, a California couple who forked over $6,000 to A Caring Heart for the kids only to charge the company with reneging on the deal midway through the adoption process. On top of everything else, the twin girls’ birth mother, St. Louis resident Tranda Wecker, now says she wants the babies back; pending further research, the children will remain in the court’s care. If this were a sitcom, the judge might sentence them all to live together as one big happy family, but I suspect the final outcome won’t be much of a laughing matter.

I don’t know who deserves custody of these kids—although based on the facts at hand, I wouldn’t trust any of the litigants to raise Sea-Monkeys—but I do know that buying and selling human lives over the Internet like so many baseball cards or Star Wars action figures is utterly repugnant. The commodification and exploitation of children represents the capitalist model at its most unsettling, but even though there are dozens of adoption sites across the Web, no laws regulating adoption over the Internet currently exist. Like everything else in the e-commerce arena, some of the companies in question are no doubt legitimate businesses with legitimate interests, but more than a few are just out to make a quick buck. The difference, of course, is that we’re not simply talking about Mark McGwire autograph forgeries anymore.

It’s getting harder and harder to defend the Internet—for all of its seemingly infinite potential, it’s increasingly becoming little more than a vast catalog of society’s ugliest impulses and desires. Because most of the legal precedents in this case are new, the British courts have the opportunity to make a profound impact on the future of e-commerce as a whole, but amazingly enough, the perceived issue at the core of the trial isn’t child welfare, but whether or not A Caring Heart defrauded its clients. According to CNN’s Charles Feldman, apparently the case itself is unexceptional, and only the impact of the Internet’s ease and economics on the business of adoption brokering makes it newsworthy. Hey, Chuck, if you really think that’s true, check out my eBay auctions—I’ve got some prime real estate in Florida you might be interested in.

Senior Editor Jason Ankeny is the star of the upcoming sitcom “Monkey Sea, Monkey Do,” about the hilarious trials and tribulations of a single father raising a family of unruly Sea-Monkeys. Write him at jason_ankeny@intertec.com.