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And Apple is not even an isolated case. Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim. Visa blocked users f

And Apple is not even an isolated case. Google will close gmail accounts, take away adsense revenues, or remove youtube videos on a whim. Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. For years Microsoft made it super hard to buy hardware without paying the Windows licence. They killed xbox remotely. They have invasive telemetry in Win 10. Paypal may refuse to pay the money you have on their account at any moment. Your money, no appeal. Twitter and facebook censorship rules are on a case by case basis. If your famous, you may be able to use hate speech. I you are an anonymous political activist, China may ask for your shut down. Big companies exist to make money. If they get too much power, they will abuse it. Not because they are evil, but because it's the logical thing to do for them. This is why I was advocating in another comment that we should not use WhatsApp new payment system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553455 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23553455 Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That's why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc. They are votes, just as much as during an election.

BruceEel 6y ago
> Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That's why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc. Elsewhere on HN today we have 'On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B (1975) [pdf] (web.mit.edu)' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 in a way, you could say it applies to this whole situation quite well.
philliphaydon 6y ago
I had about 12 domains once and decided to park them as I was busy, set them all up on adsense, went to all the domains to make sure they all worked, a couple I refreshed a few times as it wasn't working properly. The next day I got an email saying my adsense was closed for 'fake views / clicks', no way to challenge it or anything. That was like 10 years ago. I still can't use adsense to this day.
- sethammons 6y ago
  seems like an easy option for Google would be to set a blocklist of IPs for generating revenue, including the IP used to create the account. Users could add others with the big scary label of "prevent us from banning you, list IPs here that you use" that defaults to your current IP.
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    Maybe they do something like that now. This was ~10 years ago. @BiteCode_dev's comment resonated with me because it happened to me. There wasn't a warning or anything, just an email terminating my account. Slowly trying to disconnect everything away from google.
    - paulcarroty 6y ago
      Similar story, got an email "your account was blocked, nobody cares, we're so sorry". Yet another reason to avoid Google services.
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    You can already do that on your website. Check if client IP matches and then don't print JS that loads ads
    - philliphaydon 6y ago
      For parked domains you can't tho, you point the domains to google adsense.
      - NullPrefix 6y ago
        Yeah, that's correct. Initially I thought that you can control html on the parked domain.
      - syshum 6y ago
        I dont know how to do it effectively but domain Parking should be disallowed. Use the domain, or let some one else.
andy_ppp 6y ago
I have this horrible feeling that you'll soon buy the government you want; Amazon or Facebook Gov is a terrifying idea: "do you want to add on the international development budget for £14.99 per month". I wonder if it would be better than what we currently have?
- rbrtl 6y ago
  You have just inspired me. I've always wanted a political fiction to try and write in my spare time, this sounds perfect :)
  - ddalex 6y ago
    Not sure if you've read Jennifer Government
- nickflood 6y ago
  Competition in a government space would be a good thing, imo. For a while at least. Beats being quite permanently attached to a shitty gov at birth.
  - pschastain 6y ago
    Kinda what voting is for - to change the current gov't.
    - aljungberg 6y ago
      Voting can be helpful, but not always. For a long time the voting majority in some places thought treating black people as lesser human beings was fair. In those cases, having the option to easily choose a different government would be useful. In a way, having states in the US is that idea. E.g. moving from a deeply racist southern state during the height of equal but separate era to a more progressive state would have given you far better results than voting in terms of how you were treated by the local government.
      - 6y ago
ksec 6y ago
>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash. Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big business or government taking over some basic right. Yes cashless in that case is great. Is like utopian. Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury.
- kabacha 6y ago
  At one point abolishing paper cash is even remotely plausible? maybe in 100 years? So far cash rules majority of the world and I don't see it going away any time soon.
  - hiq 6y ago
    Aren't Sweden and China frequently used as counterexamples, to a certain extent?
    - Shoue 6y ago
      I'd say Scandinavia as a whole. In Norway I had to use my debit card to access public toilets in train stations, with a small fee. I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't similar to Norway and Sweden.
  - ddkto 6y ago
    Central banks are keeping a close eye on it, so I think we’ve crossed the ‘remotely plausible’ line: “Earlier this year, Deputy Governor Tim Lane spoke about the circumstances when it might make sense for the Bank of Canada to issue our own digital currency. This includes a situation in which most Canadians stopped using bank notes. We don’t believe that a digital currency is required at this time. But we are moving forward with contingency planning so that if we ever judged that we should issue a digital currency, we would be ready.” (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/opening-statement-160620/ https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/opening-statement-160620...)
jcfields 6y ago
Amazon suspended my parents' seller account last August or September with no explanation. All listings removed, couldn't log in, no direct customer service number that connects you with someone who knows what's going on, and kept taking the monthly fee anyway. Finally, they closed it entirely (again without explanation) a month or two ago. They're still holding their inventory in their distribution centers, probably a few thousand dollars worth. I'm sure they'll charge storage and shipping fees to send it back, so it's almost certainly not worth bothering about given how thin their margins were in the first place. Yeah, it's not a great direction we're going in here. These companies just don't have enough incentive to care.
- erikw 6y ago
  The incentive to care (in the US at least) is called tort law. Punitive damages against a company the size of Amazon for what sounds to me like theft should be very large. I'm sure that a lawyer would be interested in taking up this case, based on the size of the potential settlement.
  - close04 6y ago
    What are the chances a small seller will be financially able to litigate with Amazon? And even if they do and win, what are the chances they're in a better position than before, meaning it's not a Pyrrhic victory? Edit. These are actual questions, the US legal system is very unkind with those without very deep pockets, having the highest litigation costs in the world.
    - athenot 6y ago
      I don't know the specifics and I'm no lawyer but for the amount involved, could Small Claims court be an option? No lawyers involved and if Amazon doesn't send a rep, there can be a default judgement.
      - jasonpeacock 6y ago
        There still exists the problem of collecting the judgement. How are you going to force a large company to pay if they are already ignoring you?
jamil7 6y ago
Google can be a real pain in the arse with this due to their absolute lack of customer support. I had my Play Store developer account locked due to some automated trigger that I had no control over or anyone to reach out too. The upside in comparison to the app store I 'spose is I'm free to distribute my Android apps via other means.
Yetanfou 6y ago
And that, dear reader, is why you should host your own infrastructure on your own network connection. Besides being cheaper than using hosted services it: - protects you from this type of arbitrary abuse of power - helps in keeping third parties from mining you for all your data - helps in resisting censorship - protects you from surprise changes or cancellations of services (Google Reader, Google+, Microsoft PlaysForSure, etc.) - gives you more control over your data So get that Raspberry Pi, that old laptop without a screen, that abandoned diskless client or some other low-power (as in power consumption) machine with a few GB of memory and a few GHz of CPU and start tinkering. There are readymade solutions for those who dislike tinkering but this being Hacker News I'd assume most of you do. There are plenty of posts on this board and elsewhere on this subject so I won't repeat the whole list of services and software which can be used except for one: add a git repository (e.g. gitea [1], sourcehut [2], gitlab being too heavy for most SBCs) so you can be master (pun intended) over your own data. Nae lairds, nae kings, we are free. [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/ [2] https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/ https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/
- syshum 6y ago
  While I agree with that to a degree, and it does provide some protection it does not provide total protection They will then attack your Domain Register, or your DDOS protection (CloudFlare) or ISP (as more residential plan forbid running any server the ISP will ban you not for political or other reasons but for running a server on a residential plan), have your bank account / credit card cancelled (this has happened) etc etc etc
  - Yetanfou 6y ago
    No, it does not provide total protection against malevolent third parties, nothing can. It does make it harder to catch each and every person who dares to step beyond the set boundaries of the narrative so it is a step in the right direction.
- zbentley 6y ago
  > on your own network connection ISPs can ban users just as capriciously as any other company. And they do. Decentralized internet alternatives are both harder to use (and "host your own infrastructure" is already impossibly hard for the vast majority of people) and too limited to be useful. It's time to accept that and emergent behavior of the internet is to become more centralized, not less.
paulcole 6y ago
> Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. Just curious, what were the political causes affected?
- dleslie 6y ago
  9y ago they cut off Wikileaks; this is well before the 2016 election. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...
  - mattr47 6y ago
    I would not call Wikileaks political.
    - rbrtl 6y ago
      You would call it...?
      - TheHypnotist 6y ago
        The United States government called them criminal. My guess is Visa took the easy road on this.
        rbecker 6y ago
        > called them That's exactly right - there was no trial or conviction. Just the word of the administration was enough for Visa and other payment providers.
        mcv 6y ago
        It turns credit card companies into the extra-legal enforcers of the government, bypassing various laws, courts, and any reasonable appeals process. People should boycott Visa, Mastercard and Paypal over this.
CM30 6y ago
> Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. Visa and their competitors (Mastercard et al) are companies that should almost certainly be investigated over antitrust concerns and regulated like utillities. The fact they have so much control over things like online payments should be absolutely terrifying. But yeah, this is why we should definitely avoid giving large companies too much power, and arguably avoid relying on them as much as possible in general.
- TheKarateKid 6y ago
  Agreed, but they have the government wrapped around their finger. I can NOT believe the IRS issued Visa prepaid debit cards as a refund check. Now Visa can profit off of their 2-4% transaction fee to the merchant AND many consumers who use the card at an unaffiliated ATM.

BruceEel 6y ago

> Thinking about the power we give to big entities is a central mechanism to build the society we live on. That's why we should think about what we buy, the media we consumme, etc. Elsewhere on HN today we have 'On the Folly of Rewarding A, While Hoping for B (1975) [pdf] (web.mit.edu)' https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549203 in a way, you could say it applies to this whole situation quite well.

philliphaydon 6y ago

I had about 12 domains once and decided to park them as I was busy, set them all up on adsense, went to all the domains to make sure they all worked, a couple I refreshed a few times as it wasn't working properly. The next day I got an email saying my adsense was closed for 'fake views / clicks', no way to challenge it or anything. That was like 10 years ago. I still can't use adsense to this day.

sethammons 6y ago
seems like an easy option for Google would be to set a blocklist of IPs for generating revenue, including the IP used to create the account. Users could add others with the big scary label of "prevent us from banning you, list IPs here that you use" that defaults to your current IP.
- philliphaydon 6y ago
  Maybe they do something like that now. This was ~10 years ago. @BiteCode_dev's comment resonated with me because it happened to me. There wasn't a warning or anything, just an email terminating my account. Slowly trying to disconnect everything away from google.
  - paulcarroty 6y ago
    Similar story, got an email "your account was blocked, nobody cares, we're so sorry". Yet another reason to avoid Google services.
- NullPrefix 6y ago
  You can already do that on your website. Check if client IP matches and then don't print JS that loads ads
  - philliphaydon 6y ago
    For parked domains you can't tho, you point the domains to google adsense.
    - NullPrefix 6y ago
      Yeah, that's correct. Initially I thought that you can control html on the parked domain.
    - syshum 6y ago
      I dont know how to do it effectively but domain Parking should be disallowed. Use the domain, or let some one else.

andy_ppp 6y ago

I have this horrible feeling that you'll soon buy the government you want; Amazon or Facebook Gov is a terrifying idea: "do you want to add on the international development budget for £14.99 per month". I wonder if it would be better than what we currently have?

rbrtl 6y ago
You have just inspired me. I've always wanted a political fiction to try and write in my spare time, this sounds perfect :)
- ddalex 6y ago
  Not sure if you've read Jennifer Government
nickflood 6y ago
Competition in a government space would be a good thing, imo. For a while at least. Beats being quite permanently attached to a shitty gov at birth.
- pschastain 6y ago
  Kinda what voting is for - to change the current gov't.
  - aljungberg 6y ago
    Voting can be helpful, but not always. For a long time the voting majority in some places thought treating black people as lesser human beings was fair. In those cases, having the option to easily choose a different government would be useful. In a way, having states in the US is that idea. E.g. moving from a deeply racist southern state during the height of equal but separate era to a more progressive state would have given you far better results than voting in terms of how you were treated by the local government.
    - 6y ago

ksec 6y ago

>Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. That is why I am absolutely against abolishing paper cash. Edit: I know there are countries where you have a democratically elected representatives and every part of the government and even companies is held ( more or less ) accountable to the people and does not need to worry ( much ) about big business or government taking over some basic right. Yes cashless in that case is great. Is like utopian. Unfortunately not everyone has that luxury.

kabacha 6y ago
At one point abolishing paper cash is even remotely plausible? maybe in 100 years? So far cash rules majority of the world and I don't see it going away any time soon.
- hiq 6y ago
  Aren't Sweden and China frequently used as counterexamples, to a certain extent?
  - Shoue 6y ago
    I'd say Scandinavia as a whole. In Norway I had to use my debit card to access public toilets in train stations, with a small fee. I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't similar to Norway and Sweden.
- ddkto 6y ago
  Central banks are keeping a close eye on it, so I think we’ve crossed the ‘remotely plausible’ line: “Earlier this year, Deputy Governor Tim Lane spoke about the circumstances when it might make sense for the Bank of Canada to issue our own digital currency. This includes a situation in which most Canadians stopped using bank notes. We don’t believe that a digital currency is required at this time. But we are moving forward with contingency planning so that if we ever judged that we should issue a digital currency, we would be ready.” (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/opening-statement-160620/ https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/06/opening-statement-160620...)

jcfields 6y ago

Amazon suspended my parents' seller account last August or September with no explanation. All listings removed, couldn't log in, no direct customer service number that connects you with someone who knows what's going on, and kept taking the monthly fee anyway. Finally, they closed it entirely (again without explanation) a month or two ago. They're still holding their inventory in their distribution centers, probably a few thousand dollars worth. I'm sure they'll charge storage and shipping fees to send it back, so it's almost certainly not worth bothering about given how thin their margins were in the first place. Yeah, it's not a great direction we're going in here. These companies just don't have enough incentive to care.

erikw 6y ago
The incentive to care (in the US at least) is called tort law. Punitive damages against a company the size of Amazon for what sounds to me like theft should be very large. I'm sure that a lawyer would be interested in taking up this case, based on the size of the potential settlement.
- close04 6y ago
  What are the chances a small seller will be financially able to litigate with Amazon? And even if they do and win, what are the chances they're in a better position than before, meaning it's not a Pyrrhic victory? Edit. These are actual questions, the US legal system is very unkind with those without very deep pockets, having the highest litigation costs in the world.
  - athenot 6y ago
    I don't know the specifics and I'm no lawyer but for the amount involved, could Small Claims court be an option? No lawyers involved and if Amazon doesn't send a rep, there can be a default judgement.
    - jasonpeacock 6y ago
      There still exists the problem of collecting the judgement. How are you going to force a large company to pay if they are already ignoring you?

jamil7 6y ago

Google can be a real pain in the arse with this due to their absolute lack of customer support. I had my Play Store developer account locked due to some automated trigger that I had no control over or anyone to reach out too. The upside in comparison to the app store I 'spose is I'm free to distribute my Android apps via other means.

Yetanfou 6y ago

And that, dear reader, is why you should host your own infrastructure on your own network connection. Besides being cheaper than using hosted services it: - protects you from this type of arbitrary abuse of power - helps in keeping third parties from mining you for all your data - helps in resisting censorship - protects you from surprise changes or cancellations of services (Google Reader, Google+, Microsoft PlaysForSure, etc.) - gives you more control over your data So get that Raspberry Pi, that old laptop without a screen, that abandoned diskless client or some other low-power (as in power consumption) machine with a few GB of memory and a few GHz of CPU and start tinkering. There are readymade solutions for those who dislike tinkering but this being Hacker News I'd assume most of you do. There are plenty of posts on this board and elsewhere on this subject so I won't repeat the whole list of services and software which can be used except for one: add a git repository (e.g. gitea [1], sourcehut [2], gitlab being too heavy for most SBCs) so you can be master (pun intended) over your own data. Nae lairds, nae kings, we are free. [1] https://gitea.io/en-us/ https://gitea.io/en-us/ [2] https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/ https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sourcehut/

syshum 6y ago
While I agree with that to a degree, and it does provide some protection it does not provide total protection They will then attack your Domain Register, or your DDOS protection (CloudFlare) or ISP (as more residential plan forbid running any server the ISP will ban you not for political or other reasons but for running a server on a residential plan), have your bank account / credit card cancelled (this has happened) etc etc etc
- Yetanfou 6y ago
  No, it does not provide total protection against malevolent third parties, nothing can. It does make it harder to catch each and every person who dares to step beyond the set boundaries of the narrative so it is a step in the right direction.
zbentley 6y ago
> on your own network connection ISPs can ban users just as capriciously as any other company. And they do. Decentralized internet alternatives are both harder to use (and "host your own infrastructure" is already impossibly hard for the vast majority of people) and too limited to be useful. It's time to accept that and emergent behavior of the internet is to become more centralized, not less.

paulcole 6y ago

> Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. Just curious, what were the political causes affected?

dleslie 6y ago
9y ago they cut off Wikileaks; this is well before the 2016 election. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-mastercard-move-to-choke-wikileaks/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2010/12/07/visa-m...
- mattr47 6y ago
  I would not call Wikileaks political.
  - rbrtl 6y ago
    You would call it...?
    - TheHypnotist 6y ago
      The United States government called them criminal. My guess is Visa took the easy road on this.
      - rbecker 6y ago
        > called them That's exactly right - there was no trial or conviction. Just the word of the administration was enough for Visa and other payment providers.
        mcv 6y ago
        It turns credit card companies into the extra-legal enforcers of the government, bypassing various laws, courts, and any reasonable appeals process. People should boycott Visa, Mastercard and Paypal over this.

CM30 6y ago

> Visa blocked users from giving their money to political causes they decided didn't aligned with their view of the world. Visa and their competitors (Mastercard et al) are companies that should almost certainly be investigated over antitrust concerns and regulated like utillities. The fact they have so much control over things like online payments should be absolutely terrifying. But yeah, this is why we should definitely avoid giving large companies too much power, and arguably avoid relying on them as much as possible in general.

TheKarateKid 6y ago
Agreed, but they have the government wrapped around their finger. I can NOT believe the IRS issued Visa prepaid debit cards as a refund check. Now Visa can profit off of their 2-4% transaction fee to the merchant AND many consumers who use the card at an unaffiliated ATM.