Amway wrote its own compliance test before the FTC could

By the mid-1970s, Amway's business — a multi-level structure where distributors were paid partly on their own retail sales and partly on the sales of distributors they recruited beneath them — looked, on its face, indistinguishable from an illegal pyramid: money flowing upward chiefly because of recruitment rather than because any product ever reached a genuine end customer.

Amway had no existing rule to appeal to and no court test it could simply satisfy, because none existed in a form specific enough to apply to its own operations. Arguing about intent or definitions in front of the FTC, with an ambiguous standard and years of litigation already underway, offered no way to win outright.

Amway wrote its own auditable rules—10 customers, 70% resale, buyback—and enforced them, giving the FTC a measurable standard it adopted.

The FTC lacked a measurable test to distinguish legal MLM from pyramid, so it was open to adopting a credible one.

Amway's rules (10-customer, 70% resale, buyback) were auditable and enforced, making them hard to fake.

Adopting the rules before judgment turned a legal argument into an operational fact the FTC could verify.

The FTC's need for a workable standard outweighed any bias against a company-authored rule.

When facing an undefined regulatory standard, design and enforce your own measurable compliance rules before judgment; regulators may adopt them.

C. 618, explicitly credited these three company-authored rules as evidence that distributor income was tied to real retail transactions rather than recruitment fees, and dismissed the pyramid-scheme charge (Amway was separately sanctioned in the same case for price-fixing and misrepresenting distributor earnings).