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I think this has been a long time coming and probably needs to happen. My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service. When your a monopoly you don’t

I think this has been a long time coming and probably needs to happen. My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service. When your a monopoly you don’t really care about consumers because you don’t have to. Look at your local DMV, your local cable company, and Google. What do they have in common? They act in their own self interest over consumer’s interests. They take anti-consumer actions with impunity and are dismissive of all complaints. They go through great lengths to turn their problems into your problems. I’m hoping that this leads to adblock being fully supported in chrome again with all the proper hooks to be able to filter content. I also hope this leads to greater privacy and a right to be forgotten for all. Most of all I hope this leads to Google answering the phone instead of hiding behind their algorithms. (Even when I was working at a top 5 web site the only way we could contact anyone at Google was Twitter and former college roommates that happened to work there).

nova22033 6y ago
Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance companies.
- azinman2 6y ago
  As do many companies even small. Hell, lots of restaurants have poor customer service, let alone grocery stores, big box stores, etc. That’s hardly a unique characteristic to monopolies.
  - perardi 6y ago
    Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It’s a stretch to imagine any gym has a monopoly, and yet…
    - TwoBit 6y ago
      Don't you just cancel payment on your credit card and be done with it?
      - jonny_eh 6y ago
        No, business can continually put charges on it. You'd need to resort to chargebacks or litigation to stop it.
        perardi 6y ago
        Bingo. In the past (and this was a while ago), you had to pay a cancellation surcharge, even if you were month to month, unless you found someone to take over your plan.
  - coffeemaniac 6y ago
    This is a specious comparison, and you need to consider both the consequences to you of a failure of the business as well as paths of recourse available to the consumer. Consider your comparison of google to a restaurant. Google can bring your entire business to a halt with no explanation, costing you potentially your livelihood. You may never get the opportunity to escalate to a point where a human will reconsider the matter. They do this as a matter of routine. A restaurant can bring you cold soup or something, and you can complain at a waiter right there on the spot (if you're so inclined). They'll probably give you a free meal for it. Absolute worst case they can give you food which is poisoned and there is strong precedent that in this case, if you escalate sufficiently, they will be shut down.
- awakeasleep 6y ago
  Airlines are actually heavily monopolized. However, it's the routes that are monopolized. So you appear have your choice of airlines, but if you want a direct flight and don't live in a hub, then you don't really. And, often when it seems like you have a choice, you're actually flown by people from a no-name contract airline that controls that route no matter which brand is on the plane.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    If airlines are heavily monopolized it's never shown on their statement of financial position, like, ever.
    - sova 6y ago
      Inefficiency is often subsidized by the government due to lobbying under the guise of public convenience.
    - prewett 6y ago
      A monopoly is not necessarily profitable. I have a monopoly on the distribution of my blog content, but that does not make any difference in my annual income. Assuming that the parent's assertion that airlines have a monopoly on the route from airport X to aiport Y is correct, it does not give them any pricing power in general because they do not have a monopoly on all routes from X to Y. There are multiple airlines providing routes from X to Y, hence price competition.
      - missedthecue 6y ago
        Then all he is really saying is that two airplanes cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Everyone knows this. Infants know this. It's simple physics. When people talk about monopoly, they mean the absence of competition. They're talking about one firm having the control over the distribution of some kind of commodity, for instance, Standard Oil. But as you say, airlines have plenty of competition.
- ummonk 6y ago
  Ehh... Plenty of airlines have great customer service.
ehsankia 6y ago
That seems like a skewed test that is biased companies that work at scale. It's much harder to have good customer service for every user when you're making pennies per user but bank on having billions of users.
- eigenvector 6y ago
  It's also much easier to do hard things when you're making billions of dollars. I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.
  - ehsankia 6y ago
    It doesn't matter how much money they make, what matters is how much they're making per user, and how much it would cost per user to provide them to full customer support. You can get decent Google customer support if you pay 1$/month and get Google One (one top of extra storage space). https://one.google.com/about/support https://one.google.com/about/support
    - eigenvector 6y ago
      No, at a basic level how much they make per user is not the user's problem. That's Google's chosen business model. You cannot sell a defective thing then when the customer comes back say "sorry, we actually only made $0.01 on that so we don't provide customer service, goodbye." Your obligation to not, for instance, arbitrarily revoke someone's account access causing them measurable harm is not dependent on whether you deem yourself to have a sufficient level of profit on the transaction. Companies have obligations that external and not bounded entirely by their commercial whims.
      - nearbuy 6y ago
        That's the reality for companies with high volume and low margins. The number of customer service representatives per user they can hire is proportional to their profits per user. You can't change that with legislation. A company making 1/10th the profit per user cannot spend as much on customer service. At best, you can make laws that effectively ban companies from having low margins. If I buy something from my local dollar store, they have a no return policy. The items are typically low quality. But they cost a dollar. My cell company, on the other hand, charges around $60/month for a phone plan, so they have more customer service representatives.
perardi 6y ago
My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service. And who exactly is Google’s customer? The Gmail user, or the ad buyer?
- lhorie 6y ago
  I've heard a bunch of horror stories from ad buyers over the years, FWIW.
  - perardi 6y ago
    Fair. And you’d think Google would care more there, as there’s a direct paying relationship.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  The gmail user is a customer. They may not be paying directly, but they are still a customer.
  - cmorgan31 6y ago
    If you aren't paying directly then aren't you the product? You may be a consumer of a service but the customers are primarily other businesses who are trying to get your attention so you'll buy something they think you might really enjoy like the coffee maker you just bought from Amazon a hour ago.
    - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
      Pithy saying aside, if you use a free service, you're still a customer.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      No, that's just an HN iamverysmartism. A product is a something produced. Google provides services to users in exchange for their attention to ads. It's a barter of value.
  - 6y ago
arcticbull 6y ago
> Look at your local DMV. This is IMO the only part of your response I disagree with. In most of the OECD, DMVs are wonderful, or at least, functional and expedient. In most developed countries, government work is considered a public service job, and respected, appreciated and well paid. 30% of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and 25% of Finland is employed by the government. The DMV being the most utterly soul sucking place on earth has little to do with being a monopoly, but rather, Americans belief that the government is worthless, manifest. People - and services - tend to behave the way you expect them to, and this is no exception. While not a uniquely American phenomenon, it's not a function of being a monopoly. As you'll see virtually all Ontario DMV equivalents (ServiceOntario, broader in scope than the DMV, handling health card issuance, birth certificates, and a many other government services [2]) have wait times under 20 minutes [1]. They also do manage complaints quite effectively via the Ombudsman program [3], and as a last resort, fold neatly under media pressure. [1] https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-in-person https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-in... [2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario [3] https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us
- Sevii 6y ago
  Funnily enough, the DMV is quite nice in some parts of the US.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    This matches my experience as well. I suspect a big factor is that most civil-service jobs don't allow a person to be penalized or rewarded based on their general level of friendliness when dealing with the public / customers / constituents. Some people in those positions are friendly despite the lack of extrinsic motivation, but not everyone is wired / conditioned to be like that.
  - asdfman123 6y ago
    I was shocked how efficient the DMV was in Seattle after coming from Houston. It was actually a pleasant experience.
bla3 6y ago
There's tons of tiny companies with terrible customer service. Maybe "monopoly" implies "bad customer service", but the other direction certainly doesn't hold. It sounds like you're suggesting the implication works the other way round.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago
Quality of customer service and percent of market share are inversely correlated, but they're still separate variables, and one does not imply the other. Amazon is an example of a company that, despite having an enormous market share of online shopping, has remained aggressively aligned with the customer. (They'll happily use their market dominance to wring every last penny out of their suppliers and their employees, though.) Simplifying greatly, this is the main difference between antitrust laws in the EU and the US: the EU doesn't really have the concept of a benevolent monopoly. In the US, you have to make a strong case that the company is engaging in anticompetitive practices. Notably, this has less to do with how the alleged monopoly treats its own customers than with how it treats other companies in the same space.
d1zzy 6y ago
This argument doesn't seem correct to me. It's not like Google has had great customer support when they started out and later on, as they became a monopoly, they stopped doing that so it's one of the (many) signals it's a monopoly that doesn't care. Google never had customer support, it's whole business was built around that model. They are successful BECAUSE of it, not IN SPITE of, and only the latter form can be a signal of monopoly. If you want a more accurate signal here go for "Google doesn't care about its users as much as it did many years ago" in terms of anti-user features and changes it's making all the time now. But of course that's a bit harder to show as happening because you have to take each such change on a case by case basis and show that indeed it's hurting more users than it's helping (because many such changes while they seem as they go against the prosumer or the HN community, they very much follow what the average Joe needs or wants).
amelius 6y ago
Can't we have some minimum requirements for customer service which companies have to comply with?
jacobsenscott 6y ago
My DMV in Arapaho County Colorado is efficient and easy. Most things can be done online or at a kiosk. If you do need to talk to a person the wait is short. In the rare instances where I have a problem with comcast they have been able to solve it pretty quickly and easily. They are over priced though. We use a lot of google services and I've almost never needed any kind of customer support because they tend to just work. I did have some issues with a Fi line once and chat responded immediately. There are major problems with monopolies, but from my experience customer service tends to be fantastic compared to smaller organizations.

nova22033 6y ago

Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance companies.

azinman2 6y ago
As do many companies even small. Hell, lots of restaurants have poor customer service, let alone grocery stores, big box stores, etc. That’s hardly a unique characteristic to monopolies.
- perardi 6y ago
  Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It’s a stretch to imagine any gym has a monopoly, and yet…
  - TwoBit 6y ago
    Don't you just cancel payment on your credit card and be done with it?
    - jonny_eh 6y ago
      No, business can continually put charges on it. You'd need to resort to chargebacks or litigation to stop it.
      - perardi 6y ago
        Bingo. In the past (and this was a while ago), you had to pay a cancellation surcharge, even if you were month to month, unless you found someone to take over your plan.
- coffeemaniac 6y ago
  This is a specious comparison, and you need to consider both the consequences to you of a failure of the business as well as paths of recourse available to the consumer. Consider your comparison of google to a restaurant. Google can bring your entire business to a halt with no explanation, costing you potentially your livelihood. You may never get the opportunity to escalate to a point where a human will reconsider the matter. They do this as a matter of routine. A restaurant can bring you cold soup or something, and you can complain at a waiter right there on the spot (if you're so inclined). They'll probably give you a free meal for it. Absolute worst case they can give you food which is poisoned and there is strong precedent that in this case, if you escalate sufficiently, they will be shut down.
awakeasleep 6y ago
Airlines are actually heavily monopolized. However, it's the routes that are monopolized. So you appear have your choice of airlines, but if you want a direct flight and don't live in a hub, then you don't really. And, often when it seems like you have a choice, you're actually flown by people from a no-name contract airline that controls that route no matter which brand is on the plane.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  If airlines are heavily monopolized it's never shown on their statement of financial position, like, ever.
  - sova 6y ago
    Inefficiency is often subsidized by the government due to lobbying under the guise of public convenience.
  - prewett 6y ago
    A monopoly is not necessarily profitable. I have a monopoly on the distribution of my blog content, but that does not make any difference in my annual income. Assuming that the parent's assertion that airlines have a monopoly on the route from airport X to aiport Y is correct, it does not give them any pricing power in general because they do not have a monopoly on all routes from X to Y. There are multiple airlines providing routes from X to Y, hence price competition.
    - missedthecue 6y ago
      Then all he is really saying is that two airplanes cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Everyone knows this. Infants know this. It's simple physics. When people talk about monopoly, they mean the absence of competition. They're talking about one firm having the control over the distribution of some kind of commodity, for instance, Standard Oil. But as you say, airlines have plenty of competition.
ummonk 6y ago
Ehh... Plenty of airlines have great customer service.

ehsankia 6y ago

That seems like a skewed test that is biased companies that work at scale. It's much harder to have good customer service for every user when you're making pennies per user but bank on having billions of users.

eigenvector 6y ago
It's also much easier to do hard things when you're making billions of dollars. I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.
- ehsankia 6y ago
  It doesn't matter how much money they make, what matters is how much they're making per user, and how much it would cost per user to provide them to full customer support. You can get decent Google customer support if you pay 1$/month and get Google One (one top of extra storage space). https://one.google.com/about/support https://one.google.com/about/support
  - eigenvector 6y ago
    No, at a basic level how much they make per user is not the user's problem. That's Google's chosen business model. You cannot sell a defective thing then when the customer comes back say "sorry, we actually only made $0.01 on that so we don't provide customer service, goodbye." Your obligation to not, for instance, arbitrarily revoke someone's account access causing them measurable harm is not dependent on whether you deem yourself to have a sufficient level of profit on the transaction. Companies have obligations that external and not bounded entirely by their commercial whims.
    - nearbuy 6y ago
      That's the reality for companies with high volume and low margins. The number of customer service representatives per user they can hire is proportional to their profits per user. You can't change that with legislation. A company making 1/10th the profit per user cannot spend as much on customer service. At best, you can make laws that effectively ban companies from having low margins. If I buy something from my local dollar store, they have a no return policy. The items are typically low quality. But they cost a dollar. My cell company, on the other hand, charges around $60/month for a phone plan, so they have more customer service representatives.

perardi 6y ago

My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service. And who exactly is Google’s customer? The Gmail user, or the ad buyer?

lhorie 6y ago
I've heard a bunch of horror stories from ad buyers over the years, FWIW.
- perardi 6y ago
  Fair. And you’d think Google would care more there, as there’s a direct paying relationship.
TigeriusKirk 6y ago
The gmail user is a customer. They may not be paying directly, but they are still a customer.
- cmorgan31 6y ago
  If you aren't paying directly then aren't you the product? You may be a consumer of a service but the customers are primarily other businesses who are trying to get your attention so you'll buy something they think you might really enjoy like the coffee maker you just bought from Amazon a hour ago.
  - TigeriusKirk 6y ago
    Pithy saying aside, if you use a free service, you're still a customer.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    No, that's just an HN iamverysmartism. A product is a something produced. Google provides services to users in exchange for their attention to ads. It's a barter of value.
- 6y ago

arcticbull 6y ago

> Look at your local DMV. This is IMO the only part of your response I disagree with. In most of the OECD, DMVs are wonderful, or at least, functional and expedient. In most developed countries, government work is considered a public service job, and respected, appreciated and well paid. 30% of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and 25% of Finland is employed by the government. The DMV being the most utterly soul sucking place on earth has little to do with being a monopoly, but rather, Americans belief that the government is worthless, manifest. People - and services - tend to behave the way you expect them to, and this is no exception. While not a uniquely American phenomenon, it's not a function of being a monopoly. As you'll see virtually all Ontario DMV equivalents (ServiceOntario, broader in scope than the DMV, handling health card issuance, birth certificates, and a many other government services [2]) have wait times under 20 minutes [1]. They also do manage complaints quite effectively via the Ombudsman program [3], and as a last resort, fold neatly under media pressure. [1] https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-in-person https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-in... [2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario [3] https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us

Sevii 6y ago
Funnily enough, the DMV is quite nice in some parts of the US.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
  This matches my experience as well. I suspect a big factor is that most civil-service jobs don't allow a person to be penalized or rewarded based on their general level of friendliness when dealing with the public / customers / constituents. Some people in those positions are friendly despite the lack of extrinsic motivation, but not everyone is wired / conditioned to be like that.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  I was shocked how efficient the DMV was in Seattle after coming from Houston. It was actually a pleasant experience.

bla3 6y ago

There's tons of tiny companies with terrible customer service. Maybe "monopoly" implies "bad customer service", but the other direction certainly doesn't hold. It sounds like you're suggesting the implication works the other way round.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 6y ago

Quality of customer service and percent of market share are inversely correlated, but they're still separate variables, and one does not imply the other. Amazon is an example of a company that, despite having an enormous market share of online shopping, has remained aggressively aligned with the customer. (They'll happily use their market dominance to wring every last penny out of their suppliers and their employees, though.) Simplifying greatly, this is the main difference between antitrust laws in the EU and the US: the EU doesn't really have the concept of a benevolent monopoly. In the US, you have to make a strong case that the company is engaging in anticompetitive practices. Notably, this has less to do with how the alleged monopoly treats its own customers than with how it treats other companies in the same space.

d1zzy 6y ago

This argument doesn't seem correct to me. It's not like Google has had great customer support when they started out and later on, as they became a monopoly, they stopped doing that so it's one of the (many) signals it's a monopoly that doesn't care. Google never had customer support, it's whole business was built around that model. They are successful BECAUSE of it, not IN SPITE of, and only the latter form can be a signal of monopoly. If you want a more accurate signal here go for "Google doesn't care about its users as much as it did many years ago" in terms of anti-user features and changes it's making all the time now. But of course that's a bit harder to show as happening because you have to take each such change on a case by case basis and show that indeed it's hurting more users than it's helping (because many such changes while they seem as they go against the prosumer or the HN community, they very much follow what the average Joe needs or wants).

amelius 6y ago

Can't we have some minimum requirements for customer service which companies have to comply with?

jacobsenscott 6y ago

My DMV in Arapaho County Colorado is efficient and easy. Most things can be done online or at a kiosk. If you do need to talk to a person the wait is short. In the rare instances where I have a problem with comcast they have been able to solve it pretty quickly and easily. They are over priced though. We use a lot of google services and I've almost never needed any kind of customer support because they tend to just work. I did have some issues with a Fi line once and chat responded immediately. There are major problems with monopolies, but from my experience customer service tends to be fantastic compared to smaller organizations.