Comment by jennyyang
5 years ago
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
Interesting, I wonder if deliberately getting one's account flagged as a bot is the best (and quickest) way to get "deleted" from FB?
They did this to a lot of accounts back in the day and I suspected then (and now) that it was to encourage (force) people to upload high res pics of their PII information to have on file.
I had and still have the same suspicion. I had a lot of friends who said they had the same thing happen around the same time and they all just did it. The real tinfoil hat part of me wonders if it was to aid efforts being fed and ramped up by firms like Cambridge Analytica et. al. in anticipation for the 2016 election and their data collection ops as a whole.
Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.
Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs.
You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it?
(not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
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There comes a point when the demands of the business outweigh the value of the services they provide. For some of us that will include providing identification, particularly in cases where the handling of the identification is opaque. These cases are far removed from letting front line staff glance at a card to compare your face to a photo or verify the details that you voluntarily submitted on a form. The only times I have let anyone actually handle my identification for services directed towards consumers were for financial services and with my employer. The latter case was only because I knew how the identification would be handled in the transaction.
In the case of Blizzard I would say no and accept my losses. (Well, let's say Steam since I have actually dealt with them.) In the case of Facebook or Google, I would say no simply because I don't trust their motivations.
This seems fair. I need to do the same when picking up a parcel from the shop. Just an easy way of seeing your Alice or Bob and not Chuck.
For better or for worse, that is good customer support with clear remediation procedures.
Not answering a simple question about what the options are, followed by irrevocably deleting data the user wants. That’s what you think good customer support looks like? I never want to be your customer.
I think the bar for remediation procedures needs to be higher than "clear" to qualify as good customer support.
For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors).
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
Let's not forget that any time a competitor starts taking part of their market or becoming successful they just buy them out with an amount of money that is hard for any sane person to turn down.
The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't. And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So realistically competition is great on paper, but in this case the competition already has such market dominance that any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see how competition will do anything.
The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly opaque to the consumer and affects their safety.
The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control.
Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
I don't think public safety standards are the same thing as support level for free email, subscription music, etc.
We can all easily name multiple email and subscription music providers.
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Counter-counterpoint
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
Google has not done that in many years.
"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
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I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse.
That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?
The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.
Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
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Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
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Actually their support in gmail is non-existing. I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
No!
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
"Regulation" also gave us things like a rapid reduction of deaths in cars (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...) and airliners (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa...), and it's hardly illegal to start a Google competitor.
"Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.
And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years. They haven't started testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused us to get better safety in some ways.
Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.
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"Regulation" gave us the end of Slavery.
"Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.
"Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
"Regulation" gave you slavery. In the more natural state of affairs, you can't just go about enslaving someone without the risk of them running away or outright murdering you while you're looking away. It is the power of the state that captures the fugitive slave or punishes them for defending themselves.
With the arguable exception of slavery, social change gave us all those things. Regulation was just the part where we coerced the hold-outs to do as we wanted under threat of violence. Regulation in a democracy always lags social change.
> "Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
Wasn't it Henry Ford who gave us 5 day work week? 5 days to work, 1 day for church and 1 day to get out and buy the cars he was making.
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Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the same reasons.
> What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?
There's a lot of policy to encourage competition that isn't regulation. The USPS helped with early airplane development by contracting out mail delivery to civilian pilots, and grants provided by NASA et. al are partially done to help with competition in the aerospace field (can't find a source for this one but the people I know in the space all agree this is by design).
Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple platforms in a period of time so short that it looked coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.
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Regulation gave us Google (and chrome).
If the US and the EU hadn't threatened Microsoft with anti-trust they clearly would have embedded browser and search into their (then) dominant OS.
And then the competitors _tacitly_ collude and form an oligopoly, using their combined market power to consume small competitors and collectively reduce product quality.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
This is obviously not true in a majority of industries
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There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
You're probably right.
More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
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I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
Great comment. They probably are closer than I originally said.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
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For there to be competition, there needs to be regulation to help new players enter the market.
Regulation gave same-day/instant money transfers between banks in other countries, blame US politics for the regulatory capture
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
Always worth adding - snake oil was a legitimate thing based on traditional medicine in both Europe and China, imported to America. But then some folks found it more profitable to pass off mineral oil rather than bothering with the snakes.
> they would be spending billions on customer support
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
I think that's completely different from what was said in the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple for their behavior with the app stores and there are actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the same about them running a free email or social media service that has crappy support.
“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity.
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
> We need to politicize this issue.
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
Trust busting is regulation...
By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly state that companies can't do something or have to do something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of 1934.
"Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest.
Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.
> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort:
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
Citizens of the free world, you actually have a choice in the matter. Don't use facebook. Never did, no one cares.
Stop relying on "gubmint" to handle your diaper changes. Think for and act by yourselves.
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free?
* they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better
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You'd know if you tried to send a newsletter, for example, to 10k subscribers.
Just because unicycles exist as a means of locomotion doesn't mean that personal transportation isn't dominated by automobiles.
Where did the OP talk about gmail? Is it your opinion that Google is only Gmail? and that is the only service they offer?
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.