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The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories

by dollar 7y ago

The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day. They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.

techntoke 7y ago
I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point. If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits. They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence. I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
  - ddalex 7y ago
    > optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
  - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
    Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right? The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.
- devoply 7y ago
  Court costs and lawyer fees are expensive, Google the monopoly can afford the best lawyers... So this is crying for a class action lawsuit with the best lawyers. When all is said and done it will be a slap on the wrist compared to Google's revenue. So unless the courts hand out huge punitive judgment it would not do much. And even if they do the parties effected will see a small fraction of their loss. Corporate psychopathy at its best or worst.
  - techntoke 7y ago
    It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
    - devoply 7y ago
      The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man. Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system. It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
      - Fjolsvith 7y ago
        There's a scientific field I never heard of: Corporation Psychology
- hos234 7y ago
  No idea why this comment is getting downvoted. It's like an arms race out there, where every trick in the book is being used to manipulate people and capture their attention. Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could. There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner. Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined. At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix. When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.
  - ArnoVW 7y ago
    The reason it is being downvoted it is because it is using lazy debating techniques. Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality. The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
  - nathanyz 7y ago
    Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.
- icebraining 7y ago
  What would that lawsuit allege? Under contract law, companies have a right to terminate their dealings with others, for any or no reason. Maybe it would be good if there was a law restricting that for these platforms, but as far as I know, there isn't. So I don't see how a lawsuit could be successful.
  - pnw_hazor 7y ago
    The claim could be something related to interfering with their business. "GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on. Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
    - nso 7y ago
      In many countries a ToS is not legally binding, as its not considered a legal contract.
    - astura 7y ago
      ...but its entirely legal (and reasonable) for a business to stop doing business with an entity simply because they feel like it. No matter if they entity was relying on the service or not. It happens all the time.
      - zaarn 7y ago
        Except contracts may state otherwise and a court might decide that the "I no longer want to do business" clause is invalid or not applicable. And except in my countries you certainly can't just stop doing business with someone, including a few European ones. Double if the other end is a private customer.
  - EarthMephit 7y ago
    I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws) Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
- sireat 7y ago
  The problem isn't Google punishing actors they deem "bad". Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady". The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation. Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works. Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process? We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
- Can_Not 7y ago
  > However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.
geomark 7y ago
I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid. I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF. Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF. So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.
- aduitsis 7y ago
  Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.
  - geomark 7y ago
    I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all. With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.
_pmf_ 7y ago
> how badly a company can treat its customers App developers are not customers; they're indentured peasants.
robk 7y ago
Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.
- foepys 7y ago
  Until then they are happy to get paid by advertisers to show ads on spam sites?
  - dx034 7y ago
    Payout thresholds for Adsense are quite low. But it's right, in these cases they'd have to reimburse the advertisers. They could keep their share for investigation and running the ads but at least the amount that was due to be paid out should be reimbursed.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  Meanwhile they collect money from the advertisers. Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps? I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud. However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?
  - kalleboo 7y ago
    The email they send when you're terminated claims they refund the advertisers
    - GeneralTspoon 7y ago
      Although if your app is removed from Google Play, they'll happily still display AdMob ads in your app while telling you that you can't collect the earnings because your app was removed from Google Play.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. I’m not saying your wrong in this case, but that’s not a very reliable measure. Companies that have the best product can treat their customers like shit. Companies that have the lowest prices can treat their customers like shit. Any company that has a strong competitive offering that’s not based on service can treat their customers like shit.
mtgx 7y ago
Has your company filed a complaint in the current DOJ investigation of Google? All that it takes for the rise of evil is for good men to do nothing and all that.
iamsb 7y ago
I never been to silicon valley, so my knowledge about it is extremely limited. But last couple of years, I am hearing so many stories from big tech companies - from google to facebook to snapchat to uber - that I wonder if there is a big culture issue in valley based companies.
- scns 7y ago
  "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-...
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  There absolutely is, but they don't want to see it so they never will. (And I mean actually want to see it, no matter where that introspection goes. Not just telling themselves they're the kind of people that would want to see it.) People that have worked in software at non-fashionable companies outside the region can usually see it, but when people move to the bubble (geographically or mentally) they often get assimilated. It's hard to talk about, except in person. Online they can swarm any conversation, and they're from the west coast which means they're experts at passive-aggressively tearing people apart.
- WorldMaker 7y ago
  The way I've put it before, is that a culture issue (in something of a soup of them) is that "people" aren't an "interesting technology" that will, for instance, make HN headlines or provide interesting things for technologists to work on or brag about, so SV companies don't really invest in "people" to solve problems. SV companies under-value important labor roles like customer service, and instead over-value automation and algorithms. A common argument is that people don't "scale" quite like automation and algorithms do, but we have millennia in expertise in labor markets (humanity survived quite a while without algorithms pretending to be customer service) that we could do much better, if so much of SV wasn't about avoiding and/or entirely shirking labor costs for "shinier" technology solutions.
cbanek 7y ago
This also makes me feel even more strongly that the FTC should really clamp down on these very strict app stores. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/apple-inc-v-robert-pepper-et-al/17-204_apple_v_pepper_ac_pet.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/app... Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it. Both the mandatory fees, and the review policy are terrible. Both Apple and Google could just as easily "recommend" an app as "safe and following best practices" rather than banning them from the app store. And still, many apps get through the nonsense, which has been real joy for scammers and possibly illegal money laundering: https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88 https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o... I get that they want to protect their brand, but really, I think that horse is out of the barn.
- javert 7y ago
  Not this again. (pardon my sarcasm, no intent to offend.) There was a point in time when Microsoft was deeply embedding its really shitty and uber insecure Internet Explorer into Windows and causing all sorts of very severe problems problems. If that had continued, the world would have switched to free software. It was inevitable. But the government stepped in and forced Microsoft to make a just marginally better product, and thus free software never really had its day. If you want to have an open app store, just wait until Google and Apple become unbearable and people naturally start switching to a more open/free alternative. If you get the government to force Google and Apple to make better software, they will still have a duopoly in 10 or 20 years. Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. Capitalism is creative destruction, and all that.
  - cbanek 7y ago
    It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago. But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS. > Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. You could say the same of many industries, and I don't think it's any more correct for software than it is for cars, phone providers, banks, or any number of hated industries. People make shitty stuff all the time, and it sells.
paulcarroty 7y ago
> They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. Absolutely the same story happened with me.
cateye 7y ago
This happened more than 10 years ago to me too. Actually, my Adsense account is still in a strange way inaccessible while I'm using all other Google services like Gmail. I tried in all ways to get an explanation why my account was locked down and what I could do to resolve it: without any success. The whole situation is just depressing because there is literally no way to discuss it in a reasonable manner other than automated canned answers or being ignored. It was actually for me a mind changing event because it illustrated how the whole "internet is freedom" idea was a really stupid logical construct.
- ldng 7y ago
  Yes there is! At least for Americans. I can not understand why these practices have not lead by now to a class action suit?
  - theandrewbailey 7y ago
    License agreements and terms of use forbid class action lawsuits.
    - Can_Not 7y ago
      At some point, if essentially everyone is forbidding class action and requiring arbitration clauses, do we just not have rights anymore? At some point a judge will have to recognize that the abuse has gone too far and decide it's unenforceable because companies should not have the power to unilaterally "license" our rights out of existence.
  - winkeltripel 7y ago
    You can't form a class, and you don't have grounds to get anywhere in a lawsuit. You agreed to seek binding arbitration for any disputes relating to adsense when you signed up.
- conradfr 7y ago
  Same here. Still bitter about it.
tapland 7y ago
Two of the admins in our new WoW-guild got banned by Discord for inviting guild applicants (who had submitted forms asking to be invited) to our server. After a few messages there is phone verification and then after continuing to send out the accounts were banned. Contacting support was just a big 'we confirm the terms of service breach and we so not reinstate accounts'. Those accounts were in some cases the sole admins of discord communities, and the ToS breach can't have been of anything specified in the ToS, but just falls under 'anything we decide in addition'. But there is no alternative service people want to use.
- anewguy9000 7y ago
  exactly. people are noticing it with google but its all tech companies where your only point of contact is an email address. paypal, uber, facebook, steam, etc etc -- they all deny service to innocent people on a regular basis with no recourse for them. it reminds me of pre social justice movement. isnt it the business' right to deny service to anyone they want to? like all black people? actually, no.
  - non-entity 7y ago
    Recently, my Amazon payments account was banned from doing anything out of the blue. I called the customer service and they said they would forward my issue ot the correct people and I would receive a response on what was going on. A day later, I receive an automated email stating that they were "unable to confirm my account information" and that "I will not be able to transact in the future". I was given absolutely zero info on why they were unable to verify me or any corrective actions I could take to fix it.
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      Email Bezos, they have a secret support team of actual humans who can make decisions instead of working from a script, and this is how you access it.
  - de_watcher 7y ago
    Steam is actually good at supporting for now.
dahfizz 7y ago
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. The only way of identifying a monopoly is to see if they have (very close to) 100% market share. What you're talking about is a company with market power. Incidentally, this is also what the FTC regulates. Being a monopoly is 100% legal as long as you don't abuse your market position. And you can abuse your market position without being a monopoly. Maybe you think that's pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction. Google is not a monopoly - they have significant competition in every market they're in. But they are still very abusive in wielding their power.
- Aeolun 7y ago
  I do not think a market share of 90% in most markets is ‘significant competition’, especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%
  - dahfizz 7y ago
    If you created a startup that grew to take 10% of a global market, would you consider your business to be insignificant? > especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%. I'm not really sure I understand. The newest Google pixel and iPhone are similarly priced. Unless by "Google phone" you mean Android, in which case yes apple lacks choice on the low end but 10x is still a bit of an exaggeration. iOS also has >20% market share globally, while we are arguing about numbers. This gets back to my "significant competition" remark. Are you arguing that Apple is insignificant?
    - Aeolun 7y ago
      I’m arguing that one competitor is not significant competition. This competitor is also in a completely different market segment. Is there anything but Google (for this purpose I count anything with Google Play) in the <$400 market?
      - trickstra 7y ago
HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
I'm feeling this way about Amazon recently. They have become significantly anti customer.
eightysixfour 7y ago
> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.
- Justsignedup 7y ago
  I won't argue your point. I think Google should remove those. However it would be nice if Google at least made an attempt to explain to people why they are banking them. And an appeals process. Right now this is basically the wild west with if sherif says it, it is reality. We need more of a due process.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
  Yeah, that's what I got out of it too. As soon as I hit "FDA approved" I had to pause and consider that maybe Google isn't the bad guy here.
  - eganist 7y ago
    "FDA Approved" isn't a boogeyman term. It means the supplement was in fact reviewed/approved by the FDA, whereas dubious substances come with statements that their claims have not been FDA approved. Why the aversion to "FDA Approved"?
    - eightysixfour 7y ago
      The FDA approves that ingredients are “safe” to consume but the label is often used to imply the FDA has approved the ingredient for whatever health claim the manufacturer has attached to the supplement. It is a boogeyman term not because of what it actually means but how it is leveraged to say something it doesn’t mean.
specialist 7y ago
Note the lack of appeal, opportunity for recourse. Fair and impartial courts is one of the prerequisites for open, efficient markets. -- Trust busting of Big Tech should focus on eliminating the self dealing, conflicts of interest, anti-competitive behavior, and fraud. I don't care if Google & YouTube are together or apart. Ditto Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. I do care that one entity controls an entire ad network, using it to better compete against their own customers, and to squelch competition.
dspillett 7y ago
Is having 3rd party code on your pages really worth "a few pennies a day" to a lot of people? I'd rather keep a clean site.
- ghaff 7y ago
  That's a question more people should probably ask themselves. I screwed around with various ads, affiliate links, and so forth at one point. I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the small amount I was bringing in wasn't worth having the ads/code/etc. on my site. I might feel differently if it were a site focused on a particular topic, ads might be relevant to the audience, and the income were material. But, as it was, it just seemed better to keep it non-commercial.
burnte 7y ago
> Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. This happened to me about 15 years ago when I started using AdSense. I literally had JUST crossed the payment threshold and got canned. What pisses me off the most is that they cancel the whole account and don't pay any money at all, despite making it clear that they can detect the supposedly "fraudulent" clicks from real ones, but they'll punish you by cancelling ALL your payments, rather than just whatever supposed fraud there was. You know what my sin was? I looked at my site a few times. Didn't even click, just loaded it a few times to see how it looked with the ads. And yes, the "we don't have to tell you want you did wrong" bullshit is also infuriating.
ppod 7y ago
I sort of understand why search is a near-monopoly: it's free, and there's somewhat of a network effect and a self-reinforcing credibility thing. But what are the barriers for competition to AdSense? Why isn't some other company offering an alternative, like the same thing at a higher price with better support?
- dymk 7y ago
  The value is that they have so much search traffic and page views; aka surfaces to display those ads on.
tedivm 7y ago
This adsense behavior isn't even new- they did this to me in 2005! My website had a trickle of ads, just enough to pay for my college books each year. When I went to cash out Google decided it was click fraud and stole my money, with absolutely no recourse. They're an awful company with horrible customer support. It's frustrating too, because my startup has investors who keep trying to get us to switch to GCP, but I don't think any responsible company would ever make themselves dependent on Google.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Same experience for me around 2004/5. Low traffic site, when it was enough to cash out they shut down the account.
- 19ylram49 7y ago
  Whoa! I actually had pretty much the same experience about 11-ish years ago, in 2008. I completely forgot about that until seeing your comment here; wow, wow, wow!
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  And you have to wonder how Google makes their billions.
HillaryBriss 7y ago
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. +100 This has been my feeling ever since I first started using the android SDK. Google put the developer very low on the priority list, but, at the same time, the end user is also very low on the list. The only people high on the list appear to be Google shareholders and the Google employees who work on android.
tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply to my local general contractors, painters, landscapers, electricians, etc.
arbuge 7y ago
https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-a-monopoly-can-be-guessed-at-by-the-quality-of-its-customer-support/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-...
bb88 7y ago
> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers... Incorrect. The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to identify the number of competitors in that space. Google has at least one meaningful competitor to Android -- Apple -- so it can't be a monopoly. Anticompetitive behavior would be illegal, except this isn't anticompetitive, since there is a meaningful competitor, Apple, and Google isn't locking this developer into Google's platform -- in fact it's the opposite. This is just merely bad behavior -- also one that could be corrected by the markets. It's worth noting there was a time where Microsoft was the big bad monopolist, and everyone was clamoring for the government to break them up. In the end, it was deep competition from Apple and Google that knocked them off their throne, not some big FTC antitrust lawsuit.
- bjowen 7y ago
  “Number of competitors in that space” is not unrelated to “and still get away with it.” If this (monopolistic) behaviour could be corrected by competition, why hasn’t competition with Apple corrected it?
  - bb88 7y ago
    You can't have it both ways. A monopoly cannot exist if there is meaningful competition. Last I checked, Apple was still the #1 smart phone manufacturer. Anti-competitive behavior would be if Google bought up all the manufacturers in China say. And kicking off a developer off the play store doesn't do anything to Apple as far as I can tell.
- Can_Not 7y ago
  While you are technically right that it is not a monopoly, it is an oligopoly, a term which implies it is likely to have the same issues as a monopoly while still having an insufficient number of competitors. The problem compounds when Google and apple are both horizontal and vertical oligopolies. If I complain that adwords scammed me (in a court of law), they could retaliate by terminating my GCE instances and gmail accounts.
  - 7y ago
adamc 7y ago
Maybe their new mission statement is "just be evil".
numismatex 7y ago
Pewdepie (sp) and other shallow cunt youtubers can get away with ridiculous shit yet my 400 aggregated content sites that make me two dollars a month each got me banned. Fuck Google.
catacombs 7y ago
Has this happened to more of your clients?

by dollar 7y ago

techntoke 7y ago

I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.

jacquesm 7y ago
Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point. If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
- techntoke 7y ago
  It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits. They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence. I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
- ddalex 7y ago
  > optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right? The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.
devoply 7y ago
Court costs and lawyer fees are expensive, Google the monopoly can afford the best lawyers... So this is crying for a class action lawsuit with the best lawyers. When all is said and done it will be a slap on the wrist compared to Google's revenue. So unless the courts hand out huge punitive judgment it would not do much. And even if they do the parties effected will see a small fraction of their loss. Corporate psychopathy at its best or worst.
- techntoke 7y ago
  It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
  - devoply 7y ago
    The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man. Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system. It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      There's a scientific field I never heard of: Corporation Psychology
hos234 7y ago
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted. It's like an arms race out there, where every trick in the book is being used to manipulate people and capture their attention. Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could. There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner. Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined. At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix. When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.
- ArnoVW 7y ago
  The reason it is being downvoted it is because it is using lazy debating techniques. Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality. The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
- nathanyz 7y ago
  Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.
icebraining 7y ago
What would that lawsuit allege? Under contract law, companies have a right to terminate their dealings with others, for any or no reason. Maybe it would be good if there was a law restricting that for these platforms, but as far as I know, there isn't. So I don't see how a lawsuit could be successful.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  The claim could be something related to interfering with their business. "GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on. Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
  - nso 7y ago
    In many countries a ToS is not legally binding, as its not considered a legal contract.
  - astura 7y ago
    ...but its entirely legal (and reasonable) for a business to stop doing business with an entity simply because they feel like it. No matter if they entity was relying on the service or not. It happens all the time.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Except contracts may state otherwise and a court might decide that the "I no longer want to do business" clause is invalid or not applicable. And except in my countries you certainly can't just stop doing business with someone, including a few European ones. Double if the other end is a private customer.
- EarthMephit 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws) Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
sireat 7y ago
The problem isn't Google punishing actors they deem "bad". Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady". The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation. Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works. Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process? We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
Can_Not 7y ago
> However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.

geomark 7y ago

I think Google's sh*tty ways came to light long ago. And they are still doing it. I'm one of the many, many people that got screwed by Google in a similar way with their Adsense program. A long time ago it was. Back then there were actually people who communicated with you about it, at least that was my experience. But it was still stupid. I was running Adsense on a website and got a message that I was not in compliance with their policies. I emailed and got a reply that it was because I need to make sure the ads are clearly separated from the content. I replied with a link to their own guide on how to "blend" ads, which I thought I had followed pretty closely. A person replied and said "That's not what we meant". WTF. Another time on a food blog I had an article with a title that included the words "Chocolate Fetish" and a photo of two fully clothed women pouring chocolate on each other. I got an email that I was in violation of their policies with a link to that page. I emailed back and asked why. A person replied and said it was adult content. Double WTF. So yeah, it's been stupid for a long time. And now days it's just all automated stupidity. It's pretty obvious - don't trust your business or anything else to Google.

aduitsis 7y ago
Wow, the "chocolate fetish" case really kicks it out of the park. Half-serious question, did all those replies come from actual human beings? Reading the original blog post of this story and other comments here, including yours, I get a vague feeling that the communications on google's part are being done either by some kind of a machine, or by humans that can act like a machine, albeit of rather limited capabilities.
- geomark 7y ago
  I am quite sure the email replies I received were from actual humans. It's been a while, about 10 years ago I think. If those were machine generated responses they were way more advanced than anything I thought existed at that time. I weaned myself off of Adsense so I am not close to it anymore. But from what I can tell now days you don't get any response at all. With that chocolate fetish thing my thought was that the people they were using for compliance monitoring must be teenage boys with overactive hormones who see adult content in just about everything. But maybe it was actually an algorithm that matched the word "fetish" with some skin tones in a photo (there were faces afterall) and flagged it. Who knows. Who cares.

_pmf_ 7y ago

> how badly a company can treat its customers App developers are not customers; they're indentured peasants.

robk 7y ago

Of course they wait until a payout to do a deeper analysis. Most sites that sign up are spam and fraud that never earn much. So a payout threshold is a natural way of gating the spending of resources to weed out fraud and junk.

foepys 7y ago
Until then they are happy to get paid by advertisers to show ads on spam sites?
- dx034 7y ago
  Payout thresholds for Adsense are quite low. But it's right, in these cases they'd have to reimburse the advertisers. They could keep their share for investigation and running the ads but at least the amount that was due to be paid out should be reimbursed.
pnw_hazor 7y ago
Meanwhile they collect money from the advertisers. Does Google credit the advertisers when they cancel click-bait websites/apps? I know Google has a refund process that ad buyers can try to use if they have evidence of fraud. However, does Google pro-actively do refunds when they cancel fraud sites/apps?
- kalleboo 7y ago
  The email they send when you're terminated claims they refund the advertisers
  - GeneralTspoon 7y ago
    Although if your app is removed from Google Play, they'll happily still display AdMob ads in your app while telling you that you can't collect the earnings because your app was removed from Google Play.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. I’m not saying your wrong in this case, but that’s not a very reliable measure. Companies that have the best product can treat their customers like shit. Companies that have the lowest prices can treat their customers like shit. Any company that has a strong competitive offering that’s not based on service can treat their customers like shit.

mtgx 7y ago

Has your company filed a complaint in the current DOJ investigation of Google? All that it takes for the rise of evil is for good men to do nothing and all that.

iamsb 7y ago

I never been to silicon valley, so my knowledge about it is extremely limited. But last couple of years, I am hearing so many stories from big tech companies - from google to facebook to snapchat to uber - that I wonder if there is a big culture issue in valley based companies.

scns 7y ago
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." Lord Acton source: https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-absolutely.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/absolute-power-corrupts-...
forgottenpass 7y ago
There absolutely is, but they don't want to see it so they never will. (And I mean actually want to see it, no matter where that introspection goes. Not just telling themselves they're the kind of people that would want to see it.) People that have worked in software at non-fashionable companies outside the region can usually see it, but when people move to the bubble (geographically or mentally) they often get assimilated. It's hard to talk about, except in person. Online they can swarm any conversation, and they're from the west coast which means they're experts at passive-aggressively tearing people apart.
WorldMaker 7y ago
The way I've put it before, is that a culture issue (in something of a soup of them) is that "people" aren't an "interesting technology" that will, for instance, make HN headlines or provide interesting things for technologists to work on or brag about, so SV companies don't really invest in "people" to solve problems. SV companies under-value important labor roles like customer service, and instead over-value automation and algorithms. A common argument is that people don't "scale" quite like automation and algorithms do, but we have millennia in expertise in labor markets (humanity survived quite a while without algorithms pretending to be customer service) that we could do much better, if so much of SV wasn't about avoiding and/or entirely shirking labor costs for "shinier" technology solutions.

cbanek 7y ago

This also makes me feel even more strongly that the FTC should really clamp down on these very strict app stores. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/apple-inc-v-robert-pepper-et-al/17-204_apple_v_pepper_ac_pet.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/amicus_briefs/app... Both the App Store and Google Play stores I think are basically illegal monopolies. I should be able to install whatever app I want, without having to jailbreak my phone and deal with warranty nonsense from the manufacturer. Just like my computer, which I can also install whatever software I want on it. Both the mandatory fees, and the review policy are terrible. Both Apple and Google could just as easily "recommend" an app as "safe and following best practices" rather than banning them from the app store. And still, many apps get through the nonsense, which has been real joy for scammers and possibly illegal money laundering: https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-on-the-apple-app-store-bdb943862e88 https://medium.com/@johnnylin/how-to-make-80-000-per-month-o... I get that they want to protect their brand, but really, I think that horse is out of the barn.

javert 7y ago
Not this again. (pardon my sarcasm, no intent to offend.) There was a point in time when Microsoft was deeply embedding its really shitty and uber insecure Internet Explorer into Windows and causing all sorts of very severe problems problems. If that had continued, the world would have switched to free software. It was inevitable. But the government stepped in and forced Microsoft to make a just marginally better product, and thus free software never really had its day. If you want to have an open app store, just wait until Google and Apple become unbearable and people naturally start switching to a more open/free alternative. If you get the government to force Google and Apple to make better software, they will still have a duopoly in 10 or 20 years. Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. Capitalism is creative destruction, and all that.
- cbanek 7y ago
  It's true that Google, Apple, and Facebook are now getting the treatment that Microsoft got a long time ago. But I'm not sure I agree that everyone would go free software if it didn't happen. If anything, I think another company would just come along and build something slightly less crappy but no more open. These days you don't even own the software anymore, it's just a subscription or SaaS. > Software companies making shitty stuff, left alone, will die naturally. You could say the same of many industries, and I don't think it's any more correct for software than it is for cars, phone providers, banks, or any number of hated industries. People make shitty stuff all the time, and it sells.

paulcarroty 7y ago

> They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. Absolutely the same story happened with me.

cateye 7y ago

This happened more than 10 years ago to me too. Actually, my Adsense account is still in a strange way inaccessible while I'm using all other Google services like Gmail. I tried in all ways to get an explanation why my account was locked down and what I could do to resolve it: without any success. The whole situation is just depressing because there is literally no way to discuss it in a reasonable manner other than automated canned answers or being ignored. It was actually for me a mind changing event because it illustrated how the whole "internet is freedom" idea was a really stupid logical construct.

ldng 7y ago
Yes there is! At least for Americans. I can not understand why these practices have not lead by now to a class action suit?
- theandrewbailey 7y ago
  License agreements and terms of use forbid class action lawsuits.
  - Can_Not 7y ago
    At some point, if essentially everyone is forbidding class action and requiring arbitration clauses, do we just not have rights anymore? At some point a judge will have to recognize that the abuse has gone too far and decide it's unenforceable because companies should not have the power to unilaterally "license" our rights out of existence.
- winkeltripel 7y ago
  You can't form a class, and you don't have grounds to get anywhere in a lawsuit. You agreed to seek binding arbitration for any disputes relating to adsense when you signed up.
conradfr 7y ago
Same here. Still bitter about it.

tapland 7y ago

Two of the admins in our new WoW-guild got banned by Discord for inviting guild applicants (who had submitted forms asking to be invited) to our server. After a few messages there is phone verification and then after continuing to send out the accounts were banned. Contacting support was just a big 'we confirm the terms of service breach and we so not reinstate accounts'. Those accounts were in some cases the sole admins of discord communities, and the ToS breach can't have been of anything specified in the ToS, but just falls under 'anything we decide in addition'. But there is no alternative service people want to use.

anewguy9000 7y ago
exactly. people are noticing it with google but its all tech companies where your only point of contact is an email address. paypal, uber, facebook, steam, etc etc -- they all deny service to innocent people on a regular basis with no recourse for them. it reminds me of pre social justice movement. isnt it the business' right to deny service to anyone they want to? like all black people? actually, no.
- non-entity 7y ago
  Recently, my Amazon payments account was banned from doing anything out of the blue. I called the customer service and they said they would forward my issue ot the correct people and I would receive a response on what was going on. A day later, I receive an automated email stating that they were "unable to confirm my account information" and that "I will not be able to transact in the future". I was given absolutely zero info on why they were unable to verify me or any corrective actions I could take to fix it.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    Email Bezos, they have a secret support team of actual humans who can make decisions instead of working from a script, and this is how you access it.
- de_watcher 7y ago
  Steam is actually good at supporting for now.

dahfizz 7y ago

> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. The only way of identifying a monopoly is to see if they have (very close to) 100% market share. What you're talking about is a company with market power. Incidentally, this is also what the FTC regulates. Being a monopoly is 100% legal as long as you don't abuse your market position. And you can abuse your market position without being a monopoly. Maybe you think that's pedantic, but I think it's an important distinction. Google is not a monopoly - they have significant competition in every market they're in. But they are still very abusive in wielding their power.

Aeolun 7y ago
I do not think a market share of 90% in most markets is ‘significant competition’, especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%
- dahfizz 7y ago
  If you created a startup that grew to take 10% of a global market, would you consider your business to be insignificant? > especially when the markup on any non-google phone can easily be 1000%. I'm not really sure I understand. The newest Google pixel and iPhone are similarly priced. Unless by "Google phone" you mean Android, in which case yes apple lacks choice on the low end but 10x is still a bit of an exaggeration. iOS also has >20% market share globally, while we are arguing about numbers. This gets back to my "significant competition" remark. Are you arguing that Apple is insignificant?
  - Aeolun 7y ago
    I’m arguing that one competitor is not significant competition. This competitor is also in a completely different market segment. Is there anything but Google (for this purpose I count anything with Google Play) in the <$400 market?
    - trickstra 7y ago

HNcantBtrustd 7y ago

I'm feeling this way about Amazon recently. They have become significantly anti customer.

eightysixfour 7y ago

> Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, but it sounds like your client is selling dietary supplements which Google has been (IMO rightfully) aggressively removing.

Justsignedup 7y ago
I won't argue your point. I think Google should remove those. However it would be nice if Google at least made an attempt to explain to people why they are banking them. And an appeals process. Right now this is basically the wild west with if sherif says it, it is reality. We need more of a due process.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
Yeah, that's what I got out of it too. As soon as I hit "FDA approved" I had to pause and consider that maybe Google isn't the bad guy here.
- eganist 7y ago
  "FDA Approved" isn't a boogeyman term. It means the supplement was in fact reviewed/approved by the FDA, whereas dubious substances come with statements that their claims have not been FDA approved. Why the aversion to "FDA Approved"?
  - eightysixfour 7y ago
    The FDA approves that ingredients are “safe” to consume but the label is often used to imply the FDA has approved the ingredient for whatever health claim the manufacturer has attached to the supplement. It is a boogeyman term not because of what it actually means but how it is leveraged to say something it doesn’t mean.

specialist 7y ago

Note the lack of appeal, opportunity for recourse. Fair and impartial courts is one of the prerequisites for open, efficient markets. -- Trust busting of Big Tech should focus on eliminating the self dealing, conflicts of interest, anti-competitive behavior, and fraud. I don't care if Google & YouTube are together or apart. Ditto Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. I do care that one entity controls an entire ad network, using it to better compete against their own customers, and to squelch competition.

dspillett 7y ago

Is having 3rd party code on your pages really worth "a few pennies a day" to a lot of people? I'd rather keep a clean site.

ghaff 7y ago
That's a question more people should probably ask themselves. I screwed around with various ads, affiliate links, and so forth at one point. I fairly quickly came to the conclusion that the small amount I was bringing in wasn't worth having the ads/code/etc. on my site. I might feel differently if it were a site focused on a particular topic, ads might be relevant to the audience, and the income were material. But, as it was, it just seemed better to keep it non-commercial.

burnte 7y ago

> Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”. This happened to me about 15 years ago when I started using AdSense. I literally had JUST crossed the payment threshold and got canned. What pisses me off the most is that they cancel the whole account and don't pay any money at all, despite making it clear that they can detect the supposedly "fraudulent" clicks from real ones, but they'll punish you by cancelling ALL your payments, rather than just whatever supposed fraud there was. You know what my sin was? I looked at my site a few times. Didn't even click, just loaded it a few times to see how it looked with the ads. And yes, the "we don't have to tell you want you did wrong" bullshit is also infuriating.

ppod 7y ago

I sort of understand why search is a near-monopoly: it's free, and there's somewhat of a network effect and a self-reinforcing credibility thing. But what are the barriers for competition to AdSense? Why isn't some other company offering an alternative, like the same thing at a higher price with better support?

dymk 7y ago
The value is that they have so much search traffic and page views; aka surfaces to display those ads on.

tedivm 7y ago

This adsense behavior isn't even new- they did this to me in 2005! My website had a trickle of ads, just enough to pay for my college books each year. When I went to cash out Google decided it was click fraud and stole my money, with absolutely no recourse. They're an awful company with horrible customer support. It's frustrating too, because my startup has investors who keep trying to get us to switch to GCP, but I don't think any responsible company would ever make themselves dependent on Google.

iforgotpassword 7y ago
Same experience for me around 2004/5. Low traffic site, when it was enough to cash out they shut down the account.
19ylram49 7y ago
Whoa! I actually had pretty much the same experience about 11-ish years ago, in 2008. I completely forgot about that until seeing your comment here; wow, wow, wow!
Fjolsvith 7y ago
And you have to wonder how Google makes their billions.

HillaryBriss 7y ago

> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. +100 This has been my feeling ever since I first started using the android SDK. Google put the developer very low on the priority list, but, at the same time, the end user is also very low on the list. The only people high on the list appear to be Google shareholders and the Google employees who work on android.

tyri_kai_psomi 7y ago

> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to apply to my local general contractors, painters, landscapers, electricians, etc.

arbuge 7y ago

https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-a-monopoly-can-be-guessed-at-by-the-quality-of-its-customer-support/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/bugeja/2018/09/16/the-strength-of-...

bb88 7y ago

> The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers... Incorrect. The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to identify the number of competitors in that space. Google has at least one meaningful competitor to Android -- Apple -- so it can't be a monopoly. Anticompetitive behavior would be illegal, except this isn't anticompetitive, since there is a meaningful competitor, Apple, and Google isn't locking this developer into Google's platform -- in fact it's the opposite. This is just merely bad behavior -- also one that could be corrected by the markets. It's worth noting there was a time where Microsoft was the big bad monopolist, and everyone was clamoring for the government to break them up. In the end, it was deep competition from Apple and Google that knocked them off their throne, not some big FTC antitrust lawsuit.

bjowen 7y ago
“Number of competitors in that space” is not unrelated to “and still get away with it.” If this (monopolistic) behaviour could be corrected by competition, why hasn’t competition with Apple corrected it?
- bb88 7y ago
  You can't have it both ways. A monopoly cannot exist if there is meaningful competition. Last I checked, Apple was still the #1 smart phone manufacturer. Anti-competitive behavior would be if Google bought up all the manufacturers in China say. And kicking off a developer off the play store doesn't do anything to Apple as far as I can tell.
Can_Not 7y ago
While you are technically right that it is not a monopoly, it is an oligopoly, a term which implies it is likely to have the same issues as a monopoly while still having an insufficient number of competitors. The problem compounds when Google and apple are both horizontal and vertical oligopolies. If I complain that adwords scammed me (in a court of law), they could retaliate by terminating my GCE instances and gmail accounts.
- 7y ago

adamc 7y ago

Maybe their new mission statement is "just be evil".

numismatex 7y ago

Pewdepie (sp) and other shallow cunt youtubers can get away with ridiculous shit yet my 400 aggregated content sites that make me two dollars a month each got me banned. Fuck Google.

catacombs 7y ago

Has this happened to more of your clients?