Comment by nvahalik
5 years ago
> It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies
I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary.
If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
They do this stuff because people _need_ them and they know that people won't just drop them en mass.
> It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
If you are equating a world without Facebook to a world without running water, you need to spend a week camping, where you leave your phone at home.
You'll very quickly discover why they are not at all alike.
Oh if you think running water is important, try growing up in a desert. You will quickly realize still water is enough. WTF is this line of logic?
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Yes, but Google and Facebook are not public utilities, nor should they be.
Why not? The qualification being for public utility should be "is this basic infrastructure humans need to live now?". And the answer is yes. Facebook controls most of the big public speaking forums and google controls so much and in so many spaces that it would be foolish for me to even try listing.
I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.
I don't see the impediment here.
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What's stopping the next Google from doing the same? Providing poor justification for bans and removal from platforms is by no means limited to the big companies - it's endemic throughout tech - we just hear about Google and Facebook more because they're higher visibility and are considered more essential.
Antitrust regulation.
Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason losing your Google account is so impactful is that it controls everything from access to apps on your phone to your email to your calendar to being able to chat with friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say, Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN comment.
No startup can compete with Google for those services because Google can artificially offer them for free, and for very high quality, because it's all funded by their advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would have to "do things that don't scale" and offer real customer support... which also costs money.)
It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google is surviving because they offer the best value to customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from the service being offered. And in the other direction, potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being tracked by) Google ads.
Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions of a market-based economy - that companies that provide more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to exist.
Dropping Google / Facebook is not just signing up with another service. You could self host your own email and just quit Facebook entirely.
> You could self host your own email
You can. I might be able to (there’s a lot of crap around spam filtering and SPF that I’d have to fight with).
My mother, father, sister, cousins, nieces and nephews? Not a chance in hell.
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That is a very, very limited scope for Google/Facebook. Almost to the point of me suspecting you are strawmanning it. In fact, google/facebook is so endemic to our infrastructure that you can literally delete you google account. Get it scrubbed from the internet, they will still track you. Identify you. And show you ads. If you try to block their services, some pages stop functioning. It is on the verge of impossible to escape them
OK, you can lead your "resistance" to big tech your way.
Meanwhile, I'll be pushing my representative for regulatory action.
The OP is about a personal Google account, with access to mail, etc. at stake, but it's also about a developer who was going to create content for their platform. Granted, Stadia is not exactly a make-or-break gatekeeper for publishing games, but that same dev account could well be used for Google Play Store, which controls about half of the mobile market. We've certainly seen plenty of those stories here -- app developer gets locked out, only recovers account / gets app un-banned by making enough noise to get attention.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.
> drop them en mass
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
> The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And that's also why monopolies and giant corporations can and will always form in the current economic system. Crony capitalism is not a bug, it's a feature.
Oh yeah, far more easy than the government taking regulatory action is coordinating a massive consumer choice boycott.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
If all of the latest Facebook news can get my family to start questioning their usage/dependency on Facebook—I think it's fairly possible.
There have been a number of really great projects coming through HN and other sites recently that are aimed at solving some problem that people on Facebook have: photo sharing, event planning, etc.
Discoverability is really the only problem left.
You are on a site called hacker news. “Former teenage libertarian” is practically in the name.