Comment by pllbnk
3 days ago
I have for a long time said that the way to regulate these huge companies would be to have government-mandated SLOs for live support.
For example (simplified), if a user makes a call, a person with sufficient privileges to handle 90% of the cases should answer on the other end within 2 minutes. If the case cannot be handled, the higher-up with privileges to handle 99% of the cases should be reached within 5 minutes. And to be fair, it should be mandated for all companies, not only FAANG-like.
But a company like Meta (for example) with a billion customers would then have to decide whether they want to work on quality improvements for their services or whether they would like to hire a million technical support staff.
If users value support so much, you should start a competitor with excellent support. I suspect though that very few users are willing to pay the additional cost.
Once in a while support is truly needed around the less frequently used paths in the system but impossible to reach. Most users don't need it, but those comparatively few that do really value it. Problem is, these companies are so entrenched, in some cases there is literally nowhere else to go.
Abuse reports aren't even done by users. That's a classical externality.