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Ask HN: Do we need a Google Customers Union? Could it work?

336 points by CaptainJustin 6y ago

I recently saw that some Google employees are attempting to unionize and someone mentioned that Google's customers wish they could unionize. That lead me to wonder: Could Google's customers form some sort of union and attempt to hold discussions with Google? On the one hand I think it would in Google's interests to do everything to prevent having another party to have to negotiate with. On the other hand, if there was a union of customers and they occasionally demanded something everyone thinks is reasonable in the press, that may start something. Especially if Google caves on some of these issues. What do you think?

robertlagrant 6y ago
Ultimately unions are about power - transferring an individual's minuscule power in the employer-employee relationship to themselves, to aggregate into something big enough to make a difference to the employer. First question would be: how big would this union need to be to make Google do/not do things? Second question would be: emphasising that it takes away power from the individual (or in your idea's case, the individual Google customer), who would sign up to that? What I could see is another company forming that resells Google Cloud, and gets better discounts and better representation because of it. Normal market stuff.
covermydonkey 6y ago
Wouldn't Google censor the effort in it's news feed and search results?
- CaptainJustin 6y ago
  I guess but maybe that makes the news and it gains more traction? Also, is there any evidence that Google censors search results?
  - dazc 6y ago
    You could go back in time 4 years and see what results you get for some certain search terms?
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I don't know about technical censorship, but they certainly massage the algorithm to get the results they want. Google 'American Inventors' or 'how to commit suicide' for a quick demo.
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      The American inventors thing could easily be a result of the population of websites that Google is sampling from. Culturally, "African-American Inventors" is a much more common topic than "America is so great, look at all of the inventors that live here." So if you randomly and fairly sample from every web page, you are likely to end up with exactly what you end up with. (Disclaimer: I have not actually checked to see what the baseline distribution of websites is, I'm just guessing.)
dazc 6y ago
You can vote with your feet and use alternative services. Of course, we have gone so far that most people will continue to use Google but it does, at least, help send a message.
- dgellow 6y ago
  Does that actually matter? Since a while now I minimize my use of Google services when I can, but I still have to be part of their ecosystem because I interact with others. For example Google still has access to almost all my emails, and is very likely to harvest the data, even if I'm paying for a dedicated service to avoid using Gmail.
  - dazc 6y ago
    Good point. I guess another way of making a point is by having these very discussions in an open forum?
- guerrilla 6y ago
  That would be the point of a consumer union, to vote with feet en masse.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
williesleg 6y ago
Fake news.
kace91 6y ago
The point of unions is that workers are the ones keeping a company afloat. If they act in sync and decide to stop working the company is screwed. google can very well ignore a union of consumers. The most they can do is stop using the services in sync, and arguably the fact that they're trying to organise a consumer union rather than take their business elsewhere is a red flag that they'll find it difficult to do so. To put it another way, assuming that the sum of all workers is as important as the sum of all consumers, there are ~150k google employees and ~4.5 billion consumers. since these numbers are several orders of magnitude apart, to have a real effect you'd need about 10k members of a consumer union to have the equivalent force of a worker union with a single member.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
  A union telling me to suddenly move off Google Cloud because they've told Google they're doing it is unlikely to be high on a list of business priorities.
  - kace91 6y ago
    That as well! It's relatively straightforward for a worker to stop doing their job for a couple of days/weeks and then resume activity. It is not straightforward at all for a private consumer to stop depending on google for a couple of days, and pretty much impossible for a business.
amelius 6y ago
I can certainly see YouTubers starting a union. I can see Apple developers starting a union too. Basically anything that's a platform where people make money could rightfully have a union.
- frenchy 6y ago
  Those are really more like employees than customers. The chief difference here is that a customer can easily take their business elsewhere, and has no use for a union, but an employee can not.
Multicomp 6y ago
I don't need a union if i can pay $250 to have a human pick up to help me with my problem(1). but since we don't do that i guess a customers union hasn't been tried afaik. why not? i mean voting with our wallet is kiiinda like collective bargaining but idk how effective that is with googles reach. (1) my first gmail address, opened when i was 10, forwards messages to my current gmail, but both recovery emails are for a domain my dad no longer owns and the last passwords i remember are no longer valid. i answer enough security questions to make them say 'let us look at it' but my hopes are not high...
- jcuenod 6y ago
  I have the same problem and I have an adsense account attached to one of those addresses. I have no idea how much is in there but it grates me that I have no way to recover the password even though I literally read every email that comes into that address. And maybe worse than that, Google will pocket whatever money I made because I can't access the account any more. Gah!
jasode 6y ago
>Google's customers For the search engine (e.g. not GSuite), Google's customers are actually the advertisers and not the users. This is not meant to be a cynical take but just stating financial reality. The advertisers are the ones paying billions into Google's revenue to maintain the expensive data centers and host petabytes of disk space for Youtube videos. Because money flows from advertisers to Google, the advertisers are the ones that caused Adpocalypse[1]. The websurfers querying the search engine are users or consumers and not the paying customers. Not sure how a users' union would have much leverage since they don't pay. If they're unhappy, they can use another search engine (e.g. Bing) or influence indirectly (e.g. boycott advertisers which causes Adpocalypse.) [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+advertisers+adpocalypse https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+advertisers+adpocaly...
- indigochill 6y ago
  > Not sure how a users' union would have much leverage since they don't pay. Well, advertisers require traffic. If traffic adjacent to Google ads dried up, so would the value proposition of Google's products to its advertising customers. In this way, users collectively could exercise leverage on Google and its advertising clients by boycotting sites/services that serve Google ads (though good luck organizing that).
  - notahacker 6y ago
    I think the 'good luck organising that' is the key bit. The number of people who care enough about privacy to consider joining a union dedicated to protesting Google Ads but not enough to already use ad blockers isn't going to meaningfully affect traffic.
- cj 6y ago
  > The advertisers are the ones paying billions into Google's revenue I control a decent chunk budget on Google Ads (although probably not comparable to Fortune 500 spend) and would happily sign up for a customer union, along with a "users union" if one were to create one :)
- matsemann 6y ago
dgellow 6y ago
How would that be different from customer advocacy groups that already exist? Is the concept of a customer union similar, or is it something else? First time I read the term, and online searching doesn't give me relevant results.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  When I read your second line, for a second I thought you weren't finding anything relevant about customer advocacy groups and thought 'oh no... it's starting'.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
CaptArmchair 6y ago
It's called a "consumer group" or "consumer organization". These already exist. [1] In the EU these groups already take action on behalf of consumers. [2] That doesn't mean they don't exist in the US. They do. For instance Consumer Watchdog. [3] This group does critically look at business practices and models of big tech. [4] Another example would be the Consumer Federation of America. [5] This organization is an umbrella that federates plenty of local and regional consumer groups. [6] The CFA also does a ton of lobbying with the FCC and other departments. [7] Those are the more "generic" consumer groups. Looking at specific "consumer groups" that lobby on behalf of technology consumers, the most visible organization would be the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [8] If you want "discussions with Google" in the most broad terms. That's what Congress and the EU Commission have been doing with their string of hearings last year. Both public bodies are still build on the idea that they represent millions of people through the vote. If consumers want to engage in a discussion with a multi-billion dollar industry on equal footing, public hearings and investigations would be how that goes down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_organization#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_organization#United_S... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-privacy/european-consumer-groups-want-regulators-to-act-against-google-tracking-idUSKCN1NW0BS?il=0 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-privacy/europea... [3] https://consumerwatchdog.org https://consumerwatchdog.org [4] https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy-technology https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy-technology [5] https://consumerfed.org/ https://consumerfed.org/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Federation_of_America https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Federation_of_America [7] https://consumerfed.org/issues/communications/ https://consumerfed.org/issues/communications/ [8] https://www.eff.org/ https://www.eff.org/
- kludgeon 6y ago
  i think OP is imagining something closer to monopsyny
ryanmercer 6y ago
I personally see no benefit from a scenario like this and my gut reaction is to think "how would this end up costing me more money?" and I don't have a whole lot of money to spread around as is.
fergie 6y ago
Are we talking about _customers_ or _users_? They are two different things, often with competing agendas. Its great that some American Google workers have decided to unionise (in practice, a significant proportion of their EU staff will already be unionised), and they are right to point to ethical issues as the reason for doing so. In the medium term, we are going to see some sort of professional regulation in software engineering, if for no other reason than to ensure that Terminator and Black Mirror don't become a reality. The situation with customers and users is different. They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere. The best way that we can keep Google decent is by ensuring that competing services can emerge. Unionising customers/users would actually make them more invested in Google which would be self-defeating.
- xmodem 6y ago
  One customer/user going elsewhere will have no impact on Google's bottom line, though. Getting enough people to to stop using Google products for a day - or enough creators to set their videos to private for a day, for instance - would have an impact, but sadly is probably impossible to organize on a large enough scale to be effective.
- chiefalchemist 6y ago
  Customers? I think you mean users. People using Google are not its customers. These people are the source of its raw materials. Google's custoners are the entities that purchase the products Google produces with that raw materials (i.e., data). This will help get you up to speed. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-under-surveillance-capitalism-on-the-media https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...
  - muzani 6y ago
    People do pay for Google products, Gmail and Google Maps being some of the most common.
    - danielheath 6y ago
knuckleheads 6y ago
Jumping in here to invite you to check out the Knuckleheads' Club (https://knuckleheads.club/ https://knuckleheads.club/). It's a group I founded that is focused on researching and regulating Google's search monopoly. Google has abused its power and many, many users of Google know it. There wasn't really a place or group that can give voice to that anger though so I created the club. As others have pointed out, we aren't Google's customers, we are just users of their software, the advertisers are their customers. I don't think we have enough power as just users to be able to get to a point where we can negotiate with Google directly and issue demands and extract concessions. The power that we do have, as workers within the tech industry who understand what Google is doing, is talking with regulators and showing them how and why they should regulate Google. I've found regulators to be extremely receptive and grateful for the research I have provided them (i.e. https://knuckleheads.club/2020/10/07/we-crawled-our-way-into-the-big-tech-antitrust-report/ https://knuckleheads.club/2020/10/07/we-crawled-our-way-into...). Many of these regulators have the same general complaints we do and want to dethrone Google from being king of the internet. I support the Alphabet Workers Union and am super happy to see it exist and I am working hard to establish the club as a way for people working outside Google to make changes to how Google behaves.
- supernihil 6y ago
  about the common ache of ze internet i've used common-crawl with great success https://commoncrawl.org/ https://commoncrawl.org/
smeej 6y ago
Even if it were theoretically possible or legally possible, it would remain practically impossible. You'd never even be able to get enough awareness of it for people to know about it, much less convince people to care. You'll never get anything vaguely resembling a large enough percentage of Google's customers to matter to care about the issues at all. I know that sounds dismissive, but if you step outside the "people who know and care about tech and privacy" bubble for a minute, it's plain as day. The overwhelming majority of people just don't care. If anything, they like seeing more pertinent ads. They like that the Google Assistant tells them when there's traffic on their route and they need to leave early. They like the results, and they don't even realize there is a cost, much less one that should matter to them.
- jmkd 6y ago
  This is not only dismissive, but pessimistic and derogatory. Consumer confidence in big tech is way below its peak and continues to fall. The idea is both practically possible and perfectly legal (where you got the idea that a consumer group would be illegal I daren't imagine), but as others state on this page you would benefit from an actual customer group (advertisers) in addition to a consumer group (users). It would be great PR for Google to have open channels like this.
  - smeej 6y ago
    The question wasn't about whether a "consumer group" would be legal. It was about whether a union would. Those are different. I don't know whether there is any such possibility of legal recognition of a "union" of customers having any meaningful right to come to any kind of binding bargaining agreement with these companies, which is why the distinction matters. And being "below its peak" is completely irrelevant to the practicality of this endeavor when we're talking about a drop from, say, 99% to 94%. The overwhelming majority of people are not only not annoyed enough by big tech to take action, but would immediately retreat from any such action the moment they realized what it would cost them. A miniscule fraction of the people who use these services, or even pay for these services, care enough about their misdeeds to stop using them personally, much less to join some sort of advocacy group about it.
f6v 6y ago
That’s what you need a government for. How would that even work? How many people do you need to get any kind of leverage? And how would you make any decisions?
jtdev 6y ago
Would be difficult in the U.S. it seems... we’ve allowed corporations to convince an increasingly impoverished population that holding corporations to account is “un-American”.
Mauricebranagh 6y ago
That's not a "Union" in the usual sense of the word as its used currently.
villgax 6y ago
Isn't HN that platform?
- Octoth0rpe 6y ago
  Is hacker news an organization whose purpose is to collectively organize/create leverage in order to enact customer-positive changes in google's policies? Obviously not. It _may_ be a side effect of the discussions that occur here occasionally.
  - johncena33 6y ago
    > It _may_ be a side effect of the discussions that occur here occasionally. Occasionally? HN is obssessed with Google. Everyday there is at least one hit piece on HN front page. Out of all the problems in this world and the tech industry, in HN logic Google is the utmost priority.
  - villgax 6y ago
    The ones that I can remember pretty clearly are mostly about surprising cloud bills, app or account takedowns etc. So if HN is getting things done then maybe this is the most passive union ever?
john2010 6y ago
may be site where you post all your complaints will be delisted!
paultopia 6y ago
The real issue with customer's unions is: how do you get people to make binding commitments to take collective action? Suppose everyone agrees "unless google does X, we'll all switch to AWS/start searching on DDG," how do you monitor and enforce that? (And I have no clue how antitrust law would see the problem.) Shameless self-promotion: I've speculated in the past that software can help here, eg, by hooking into corporate account APIs to trigger automatic mass cancellation of orders. That's one of the examples of potential "transformative legal technology" in this (sadly paywalled, sorry) academic article: https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047 https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047
baron_harkonnen 6y ago
This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. In some parts of Europe they still have these. Unfortunately in the US companies were foolishly permitted to both purchase the voting power of representatives and directly influence the will of the people to render the government virtually useless (though still a useful distraction for the people)
- fakedang 6y ago
  And even grant themselves equal rights as citizens and influence government.
  - arcbyte 6y ago
    Nope. Organizations come in many kinds, including corporations. They're all just ways of organizing people, who have rights that they can choose to come together to exercise. That's it.
    - hashkb 6y ago
      Are you saying that the political will of a corporation is no more or less than the sum of the political wills of the people in the corporation?
      - Cthulhu_ 6y ago
        In theory, yes. In practice though, it's the shareholders that call the shots, and the employees are threatened with getting fired if they try and organize and start making demands. But that's where governments can come in, and implement things like basic worker rights.
        6y ago
farco12 6y ago
I don't know about specific groups currently implementing the idea, but what you're talking about sounds like the concept of 'data labor unions' that's been proposed by economist Glen Weyl.[1][2] [1]http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/data-as-labor/ http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/data-as-labor/ [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKEL7I03vrg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKEL7I03vrg
pjmorris 6y ago
I was pondering a less organized approach: What if we could persuade 'everybody' to take an #InternetDayOff every once in a while? If enough people thought it was a good idea and could step away, a full 24 hours without traffic to some of the big popular services might give them pause.
- PhaedrusV 6y ago
  How about an internet year off...
- blackbrokkoli 6y ago
  Will never work. You can get stuff like this to work if it's pathetic and emotional enough (9/11 minute of silence, clap for essential workers from your balcony) and if it's low-cost (shutting up for a minute) or no cost (holiday). And that still is highly regional. Even "The West" are not that many people. Sadly, your proposal checks none of the mark. Don't get me wrong, I don't think it would be bad or anything, but you know, people are people.
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
So many questions. Would this be a union for all search engines, or just Google's? Why is it needed? What enforcement would there be, if the search engine were not performing to the union's expectations and needs? Good old fashioned competition has usually been the way people deal with a service or product they didn't find satisfactory. Try DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Baidu. Vote with your feet. I still think Google is the best general search engine out there, but DDG is my daily driver because it's good enough and provides a bit more privacy (or so I imagine).
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
Reminds me of the youtuber union that, as far as I know, went nowhere because most content creators apparently prefer to just bitch about how bad it is instead of trying to change anything. I suspect the same would be the case with a users union: nobody would join because why would they. Complaining and getting outraged about google being evil is fun, but changing it requires effort.
tlb 6y ago
Worker’s unions have tremendous negotiating power. They can call a strike and expect all their members to obey it. A customer union would have to be able to credibly threaten: all our members will stop using your products until you agree to our demands. It’s hard to imagine enough G customers doing this. The customers who care enough about privacy to take simple steps like using DDG and installing ad blockers, aren’t a big source of revenue for G anyway.
hammock 6y ago
A lot of people here unsure whether OP is talking about users (consumers) or customers (advertisers). Given that he used the word "customers" it is pretty clear to me...but there is a lot of shitposting in here.
- judge2020 6y ago
  I don't think OP made the distinction themselves when making the thread. Google has an antitrust case against them that helps their customers. We need something else like regulation as users.
dalacv 6y ago
The answer to many of our modern problems with technology, society, health: just unplug.
PedroBatista 6y ago
Such "union" would legitimize what Google has been doing. That's what governments are for, Google must change the way they do "business" (unlikely) AND still be broken up. The exact same for other tech behemoths. That's not gonna happen however, they already own everything including government and public opinion.
caeril 6y ago
No. Just stop using their services/products and block all their prefixes at the network edge. They've had ample opportunity to not be evil, and they've chosen precisely the opposite, every time.
shadowgovt 6y ago
If one is to go this road, one may consider the model of the boycott organizations structured by the NAACP---how they designed them, how they enforced them. Practically, the hard power any such organization is going to have would start with their spending dollars (and possibly their signal... A lot of Google's "special sauce" is big data from big usage, and if usage goes down, software quality suffers). Google would (and does) listen to a significant percentage of their dollars-base saying "Change this or I'm taking my ads to Facebook and my infrastructure to AWS." They may perhaps listen to a significant percentage of their user-behavior-base saying "Change this or I'm using Bing," though it'd have to be a hell of a large organization to make a dent.
rootusrootus 6y ago
Assuming you could make it work, then of course, yes it would be effective. Voting with your wallet works, we know this, so orchestrating it formally would work even better. If you had a group that could tell Google they control 20% of their income, for example, then Google would definitely seek to keep that group happy. But as others have pointed out, you really just created a government or a consumer group, and the creation and maintenance of that group is a non-trivial challenge by itself.
splaytreemap 6y ago
Entirely depends on what the goals of the union are. If you want to improve your position in search rankings, a union is not going to help you. If you're a youtube creator who wants a larger cut of advertising revenue, a youtube creators union may make sense. I find it unlikely that there's any issue that cuts across all of Google's customers (advertisers, publishers, cloud users, gsuite users, etc), so a Google Customers Union probably does not make sense.
arrosenberg 6y ago
Absolutely not. These are anti-competitive abuses, and the only self-executing, guaranteed remedy is to break them up and let something else take its place. Consumer unions are a form of corporate moat-building that became popular in the 70s and was never as effective as proponents wanted it to be.
chrisandchips 6y ago
Who are we considering to be google's customers here ? Someone will have to pay union fees and elect representatives, presumably. I can see this being a big hurdle for the idea.
LatteLazy 6y ago
It would be interesting to see a union of youtube channels. They seem to be subject to terrible customer services, arbitrary deletion and minimal consultation on changes.
- guerrilla 6y ago
  Germany's IG Metall was trying to organize that at some point I beleive. I guess it never panned out. [1][2] 1. https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-youtube-union-ig-metall.html https://www.engadget.com/2019-07-29-youtube-union-ig-metall.... 2. https://fairtube.info/en/ https://fairtube.info/en/
mproud 6y ago
Aren’t there consumer advocacy groups, like the EFF or the ACLU? There are also legal avenues likes class-action lawsuits people will invoke to protect themselves and others harmed. Still, it’s private enterprise. If public exposure doesn’t work on certain issues, I think some kind of regulation is ultimately required.
jkarni 6y ago
I've thought a lot about digital unionization [0] in the past year or two, primarily because I think it's an important approach to a number of problems we are witnessing. The thoughts below led some friends and I to start building https://izens.net/ https://izens.net/ as one general approach to this problem. The first thing to notice is that the calculus of unionization or collective action is very different than what we historically know. As a user, whether you see yourself as a customer or a laborer vis-a-vis Google, in both cases your position is different than traditional customers or laborers. The importance of convenience for all your transactions is much bigger. We probably aren't willing to spend an hour a week going to union meetings, because Google isn't as significant to us (as users) as a traditional employer, and because we have a similar relationship to a variety of other companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.) as to Google, which would by analogy thereby entail a lot of time. Moreover, it is much harder to build a social relationship with people in similar positions. At a job, or at a checkout line, you meet people in the same place as you. With a Google service, it's just doesn't happen naturally that you encounter people (and can easily and spontaneously communicate with people) in the same position as you (even though there are likely so many more). The companies themselves control how you inhabit their "space" - whether you can "meet" other people in the relevant way currently depends, for instance, on whether there is a chat or forum connecting you to those people. And of course, relying on their graciousness for that space is not going to go down well most of the time [1] as soon as this collective organization starts becoming significant. (This sort of control of how social interactions take place has been compared to the British enclosures.) There are probably a number of valuable ways to collectively organize in this space. But the above considerations, and the fact that our own skills (and hence ability to contribute) are in programming and design, led a few friends and I to an idea: that we could create those spaces for collective organization via browser extensions and phone apps. The idea is that you install a browser extension (we haven't started on the app), and join one or more unions (or campaigns). The browser extension, based on the policy files of the unions you've joined, can a) block the website for some period of time for all its members, with some message; or b) display a banner when a member visits a site. The union members discuss and decide what the policy will look like. From there you can organize boycotts and make demands. (https://izens.net/ https://izens.net/ (and the browser extension) is still in it's early phases, so feedback is much appreciated!) [0] I agree that it may be misleading to think of it as a consumer union in most cases, for reasons other people have mentioned. On the other hand, the Posner & Weyl idea that we are data laborers suggests it might be a labor union. Ultimately, none of this matters much to the broader points. [1] Compare this to moving out of WhatsApp, which I'm in the process of doing. I can use WhatsApp itself to get in touch with the people I want to coordinate with, thus making that coordinating relevant and timely.
nt2h9uh238h 6y ago
Your company is user hostile you users are thinking about creating a union - because nobody else is caring about their interest. Caring about users should be any firms #1 priority, lol.
jasonv 6y ago
I've wanted (and have been mulling) a boycott platform, but with built-in contracts and degrees. For instance: I commit to not buying Starbucks for 90 days in order to support a mandate that they reduce their plastic usage 20%. Or, I will not pay for UFC PPVs for 6 months to protest Dana White's support of Donald Trump. It'd be nice to quantify resistance to corporate endeavors on a populist level. Of course, given current social circumstances, it would be hard to keep it civil.
m-p-3 6y ago
Maybe some kind of ombudsman (government-mandated, with some legislative ability) that is mediating the conversation between both parties and tries to find a good middle-ground or correct a wrong. Too many Google customers gets wronged without the ability to get reparation or to talk to an actual person, and considering the size of Google that is unacceptable with the impact they have on everybody's lives.
CryptoPunk 6y ago
This could be done via blockchain-based smart-contracts. Self-executing contracts could trigger a mass migration of user accounts to another SaaS provider if some set of conditions are met, like for the example, the number of accounts party to the smart contract reaches a predefined threshold. The purpose of this smart contract could be even more general purpose than that, in being structured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), with accounts voting to decide what the accounts will collectively do.
iandanforth 6y ago
This is a good idea. Large, and small, groups of individuals do influence massive organizations like Google. Lobbyists do it on behalf of groups, taking advantage of their personal connections to get access to decision makers. Public action orgs like Sleeping Giants use collective shaming to influence decision makers. Activists of all stripes use protest and direct action to create change. You don't have to rely on existing assumptions about unions, or customers vs user, or many other concerns I see raised in other replies. The fundamental thing you're trying to do is influence decision makers and a large group of people is certainly one way to do that. The effectiveness of such a group will come down to factors such as how well you manage message, what access you can get, and what degree (and from how many angles) you can apply pressure and persuasion. If nothing else starting a place where Google users can collect, vote on, and discuss their top priorities could form the basis of discovering how large a group you can attract, where the passion exists, and what resources you can muster toward the effort.
_1tan 6y ago
This concept might be of interest or inspiring: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_purchasing_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Group_purchasing_organization I am - or rather my business is a paying Google customer and I would welcome this.
epc 6y ago
In 1955 IBM mainframe users formed SHARE which grew to be one of two mainframe user groups (the other being Guide, defunct since 1999). SHARE runs conferences, provides software builds (or did) and serves as a way for MVS ("Z/OS" this week) and VM users to pool together requests and requirements with IBM. Kind of surprised similar groups haven't appeared for AWS, Google, and Azure customers*. * edit: I mean customers, people paying hard cash. Users relying on free services need to figure out some form of leverage and band together behind that.
fab1an 6y ago
Back in the Web 2.0 days, I started a "users' union" at the then largest German social network StudiVZ. It was only half-joking, and to my surprise quickly attracted the attention of the network's founders, who reacted in the best possible way, trying to utilise it as a feedback channel for the product. Ultimately, this fizzled out (just like StudiVZ after its acquisition and subsequent demise vs Facebook), but I still believe there is merit to the idea.
vondur 6y ago
I don't think so. If they had to offer support for these services that they provide now, people would have to pay for it. At this point so many people have been using free email, photos storage etc.. that I can't imagine many people would want to pay for it.
annoyingnoob 6y ago
If you have so many problems with a vendor that you need collective bargaining among customers then you really need to find a new vendor. You do not need a union, you need to move on. Let Google fail if they can't figure it out.
snambi 6y ago
why not? it should be possible. I don't think it is against the constitution.
ashneo76 6y ago
This would be amazing. I have wanted this for years. * You are renting an apartment from a huge company. The company changes a policy. There is no way for you to unionize with your neighbors to fight that. Ditto for trying to fight any big corp like Comcast, ATT, etc. Our powers are diluted whereas the big forms have warchests that a single individual can never match. A govt was supposed to do this but it is not working. Doesn't mean that we wait for the govt. The time is now and we must act otherwise these but companies will keep running and ruining the planet.
stephenr 6y ago
I think you need to stop drinking the google kool-aid. A customers union? Are you fucking kidding me? How much anti-consumer shit does a company have to do before you’ll realise they’re not in business to serve your needs, they’re in business to serve you ads.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I mean, most companies are not in the business of serving your needs either, they are in the business of having you work for them.
  - stephenr 6y ago
    > most companies are not in the business of serving your needs either The vast majority of companies are in the business of providing you something you need or want, be it a service or a product or both, in exchange for monetary compensation. That's kind of the definition of "serve", to provide a service.
hkt 6y ago
Yes! There is already such a thing for a bank in the UK: https://saveourbank.coop/ https://saveourbank.coop/ A large enough group of people directly switching as members and influencing others to do the same can work to keep a company in line. It'd be unique and awesome.
obviouslynotme 6y ago
It would be difficult to form. Not every customer is even close to equal. The customers who buy the most from Google already have massive leverage. If anything, participating in a union would dilute their demands amongst the mob. The union has no forces keeping it together.
pba 6y ago
I would say neither 'government' nor a 'union' are the answers in this case. In the mostly free-market based economy that we live in today (thinking of the USA and most European countries) the proper solution is to 'vote with your dollar' and go with a provider other than Google. This increases market competition and incentivizes Google to improve their services.
mbostleman 6y ago
I can't help but feel that there's a need to substantially broaden the idea of monopoly and anti-trust along with enforcements and incentives against it. It seems as if the need for employees or customers to combine power (earning or buying respectively) is inversely proportional to other available producers (eg. competition).
sudosteph 6y ago
I'm down - I 'd rather see a broader -"Personal Data Provider Union" though. Since our personal data is supposedly worth money, it seems reasonable to least attempt collective bargaining as way to negotiate some protections around it. I actually proposed this "Data Union" concept a while back on the Andrew Yang subreddit, since data ownership is a part of his platform. But unions aren't super hot in general right now. I still like them though, and am an IWW member exactly because I think they still have potential.

sandworm101 6y ago

>> professional regulation in software engineering, if for no other reason than to ensure that Terminator and Black Mirror don't become a reality. Engineers have professional associations. That never stopped a single engineer from building weapons of mass destruction. Lawyers are subject to perhaps the most intricate body of professional regulations and so lawyers rarely ever do anything that might hurt society at large. Professional organizations exist to benefit their members. They don't exist to prevent social ills. That is the role of government. A bar association for software engineers won't prevent Skynet. Government regulations setting limits on the powers attached to AI might.

gus_massa 6y ago
I agree with most of your comment, but > A bar association for software engineers won't prevent Skynet. Government regulations setting limits on the powers attached to AI might. A government regulation will only ensure that the government get the AI power fist, they need it to combat terrorism or something. And anyway, Skynet was a project of the government ...
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Combat terrorism or protect children.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  I'm OK with government getting AI tech first. In my country I have say in how my government works. If I don't like what they are doing I can elect better people, even run for office myself if necessary. I don't have any control over tech companies or other private actors out to make a buck.
Nbox9 6y ago
> Government regulations setting limits on the powers attached to AI might. This only works if all governments agree on this rule. AI is an economic competitive advantage, and it’s in every countries best interest that advances in AI are developed in their borders.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Lawyers are subject to perhaps the most intricate body of professional regulations and so lawyers rarely ever do anything that might hurt society at large. Patent trolls and the copyright mafia are a scourge on society... the amount of progress that they have blocked for decades is astonishingly bad. And that's not even coming remotely close to the lawyers that aided organized tax theft (aka "tax optimization") or threatened the foundations of democracy itself (Giuliani and the rest of Trump's associates).
- gamblor956 6y ago
  Patent and copyrights are embodied in the U.S. constitution, so if you have an issue with that take it up with the Founding Fathers. The specific details of IP protection are determined by Congress, so if you have issues with the details take that up with your local federal legislator. Tax optimization is generally promoted by accountants not lawyers, though tax is an area that both accountants and lawyers can practice and so some lawyers are certainly involved in tax avoidance advising. Though as tax is also one of the few areas where advisors can go to prison for their advice (and moreover, for advice that was technically within the bounds of the text of the law at the time the advice was given), few lawyers are willing to get involved in tax avoidance that is borderline tax evasion. Guiliani and the rest are facing disbarment or worse for their roles in threatening the foundations of democracy. Like most punishments, this one must take place after the offending act is committed, since we can't preemtively discipline someone for something they haven't actually done (yet).

lucideer 6y ago

> in practice, a significant proportion of their EU staff will already be unionised Citation needed. Unions are something that's actively discouraged within US multinationals' EU offices as well, so I wouldn't be so sure the overall picture is rosier in Europe than it is in the US.

soco 6y ago
There's no umbrella answer but overall it is rosier in every aspect. For example, EU has a mandatory thing called "employee representatives" (although created at employees' initiative, it cannot be blocked) and some EU countries mandate also union members into those. Obviously these constructs will create a lot of friction with US management style, but I'd say that's the very reason they were created.
- lucideer 6y ago
  > overall it is rosier in every aspect It's definitely rosier in most aspects insofar as protection of employee rights is much better at a legislative / public level in Europe, and therefore there's more supports available. These may however often be your company's HR dept. ticking boxes (HR departments of course by and large existing to protect the company from potential employee complaints first and foremost, rather than to protect employees). In the case of a US-based office where such state-mandated supports are absent, and the employees have put together a body to enable collective bargaining, the supports—while less official and state-supported—may be of more immediate material benefit as they practically address current grievances. > some EU countries mandate also union members into those Do you have a reference for this? I'm curious to know which do and which don't (it's certainly not anything that's been brought in at a Directive level).
  - soco 6y ago
    In Spain is mandated while in Germany, the Netherlands or UK it's just customary, and for the rest it might be anything in between. Here's more about it, see respective "workplace representation" sections: https://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Relations/Countries https://www.worker-participation.eu/National-Industrial-Rela...
    - guerrilla 6y ago
      I just read that they were mandated in Germany at Amazon's FCs. Is that not true? (Sorry, original article in printed Swedish.)
      - soco 6y ago
        If yes then not by law but by said company-wide agreement.
joshuamorton 6y ago
This gets tricky because there are Unions[0] and works councils in the EU, and they're different. Works councils[1] are usually per company, while unions are not. Neither maps precisely onto the conventional American definition of a "Union"[*], nor onto the AWU, which is a members-only union. I'm not sure how many Google employees in europe are Unionized, but I know works councils exist in multiple nations. [*]: My understanding is that a works council is government mandated, and a small group of employees can set one up, they have some formal negotiating power like a NLRA union, but don't represent all employees, and have a limited set of things they can negotiate about (for example they can deal with work conditions, but I don't think they can negotiate pay or strike). EU trade unions are big national organizations, one per industry that do lobbying and counter corporations. Conventional US NLRB unions have a monopoly on negotiations with the company, but require 50%+ membership. Members only unions have no formal legal power beyond non-retaliation, but can still negotiate with a company (about anything). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Europe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_unions_in_Europe [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

kingludite 6y ago

> This is typically called a “Government”. In the US we used to have this at the town, state and federal level. And these “governments” wouldn’t just work with one company, but a many companies. Sounds like a good idea! > The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies. Ah yes, people were so sophisticated before the internet. I find it hard to remember how things even worked. The representation was a fantastic solution for the communication over distance problem. Today it would be rather silly to propose representation. I don't need anyone to represent me. Strength in numbers is enough. While big [worker] unions are powerful they do tend to get distracted by large issues. Smaller tailored unions spend all of their time on their much smaller scope. It is also very helpful for Google to see which issues users would like to see addressed. They probably have them documented internally already but cant find a way to prioritize them. There could be constructive dialog rather than a moaning contest that addresses only the company most moaned about. As with employee unions, being a member makes the employer act entirely different.

kiliantics 6y ago
I think representation is not only intended to solve the distance problem, but is also a form of efficiency, so that you don't have to weigh in on every little detail of society's organisation and therefore have time to get on with your own business. That said, we throw away a lot for this "efficiency" and end up with corrupt political parties and lobbies that act completely against our interests. Maybe we can't have a true democracy unless everyone is putting a lot of time into participating in decision-making, rather than just hitting the ballot box once every couple years. I actually think this idea of doing things the "hard way" usually getting better results applies in almost everything, personally. There are lots of alternative models out there to the one that is glorified in the US, invented by the Founding Father deities some centuries ago. There has been more than a little innovation since. Worker co-ops -- which have existed for almost as long as the US, or longer in some sense -- have experimented with many structures where workers or consumers, or both, share power in how the company is run. Alternative government structures with more direct representation and delegation have also been attempted, e.g. the democratic confederalism approach in Rojava, which also includes worker and land co-operatives for organising their industries. I think this discussion is also leading towards the suggestion that Google's services should become more like utilities and therefore be publicly owned and managed. Basically nationalised. This makes a lot of sense when you consider how powerful the search engine is and how much of every person's data and flow of information is controlled by Google. However, it wouldn't make sense, or at least it wouldn't be fair, for the US to be the government that nationalises Google, since it's not only the US population which uses this "utility". It seems we need to invent a new kind of concept that considers the global population as a "public" that owns and controls these vital global resources.
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paultopia 6y ago

Disagree. Yes, government regulation would be nice. But it's a little unfair to accuse the OP of trying to reinvent government by proposing that consumers organize outside of government. People organize to engage in collective action outside of governments all the time. In addition to labor unions, consider civil society nonprofits. It's not bizarre or (as another comment suggested) some kind of tech-bro magical thinking to say "hey, the government isn't regulating this group of people, let's organize to get some collective power going."

xhkkffbf 6y ago
Absolutely. And remember we're not customers, we're the product. So you might call us workers too.
- geofft 6y ago
  We're the "product" of services like advertising, but I've seen very few individuals express opinions on Google's advertising product (beyond "stop," or at best "stop tracking me"). Our opinions tend to be on services like Gmail and Drive and Reader and Hangouts. In that case, we're closer to a customer - or more accurately, we're a positive externality. Google does offer paid support for most of these services, including an account rep that you can actually talk to in person. But you have to be paying for them. Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail.
  - wutbrodo 6y ago
    > Individuals who use Gmail for free are effectively just publicity for Google so they can convince large employers to pay them for Gmail. I don't think this is accurate. Having users logged in while using Google Search is worth far, far more to Google than the GSuite sales bump from having free Gmail users.
airza 6y ago
The magical thinking comes from trying to organize a significant portion of Google's customer base (all android phone users, all google search users, etc) spontaneously into a body that can really damage their value proposition financially. In a labor union _all_ of the value is generated by a bunch of people who are geographically close together and able to organize more easily :)
- paultopia 6y ago
  Oh sure, that would be extremely difficult for lots of reasons. But I took OP to be asking in good faith if those difficulties could be surpassed, not assuming they could be.

idrios 6y ago

But this actually brings up a good question about the role of unions to begin with. Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? I like OP's suggestion of having a consumer's union. In an analogy to a software stack, having the government responsible for this is analogous to building a monolith, while making unions is analogous to a microservices solution. Integrating this role into the government could become bureaucratic and comlicated, maybe ineffective because of it, but a consumer's union might work but with it's own set of particularities.

silexia 6y ago
A consumer union is a fantastic idea! If you give government this power, they will not listen to consumers or the business... Government only listens to politicians. Google wants more revenue and is highly motivated to work with a consumer group.
- Chant-I-CRW 6y ago
  When a workers' union calls for a strike it only works if most of the members support the strike. The potential benefits must outweigh the risk of hardship and inconvenience. Often the majority of workers support the strike because they are in a shared situation and will all receive some level of benefit if it works. A consumer union, to have enough momentum to actually make the Googles and Amazons even blink, would need hundreds of thousands of members. That vast quantity would need to agree to collective action and then follow through. If the consumer union reps determined the best way to convince Google to make a change was to hit them in the pocket book then the majority of the union members would have to cancel subscriptions and deal with the inconvenience. It is my pessimistic opinion that the general consumer base would not follow through on whatever action the union selected. In the unlikely event they did follow through, even a hundred thousand users dropping a Google product or leaving Amazon Prime would barely impact those companies enough to make them alter their policies or improve their service levels.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    But if it were 100K of their biggest/highest paying consumers who make up the bulk of the union, they would at least come to the table. I share your pessimism of inaction.
lefrenchy 6y ago
Well workers unions represent the workers more directly than the government does, and specifically for that workplace.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Mostly for historical reasons - it was workers unions who fought and paid in blood for worker rights, and no one (other than the Nazi regime and various real-Communist countries) tried to have governments assimilate unions. Another reason is that governments are slow as molasses to react to changes. A union is way faster and it has (by its existence) a direct connection to the immediate needs of the workers.
p4bl0 6y ago
> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Why not ask the reverse question? “Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union?”. This is actually the political project of anarcho-syndicalists [1]: workers could self-organize the production and the collective life through democratic federalist instances. The idea has been theorized since at least 1906 in the Charter of Amiens [2], an historical text of syndicalism [3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.h... where we can read “the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”. At least in France, the biggest workers union (CGT) is still organized in a way that would allow this, by having both geographical and per-industry-branch instances (sorry I lack the proper words to describe this in English). It is also what the Spanish CNT did during and after the Spnish Revolution of 1936 [4,5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
- lhorie 6y ago
  > Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union? By "instead", do you mean having no government whatsoever? Who'd be responsible for traditional government responsibilities in that case? (such as police, firefighters, water/sewage, garbage collection, etc.) I don't think unions can take on any of those tasks in any meaningful sense (e.g. do you get 5 firefighter corps from different unions to come to the same fire in an apartment complex?)
lhorie 6y ago
There's one big structural problem with the idea of a consumer union: what happens when negotiations break down. Typically for a worker union, that means the union tells workers to go on strike. Imagine being told by your union that no one should use google.com/gmail/maps/docs/etc until further notice. It wouldn't fly no matter how you slice it.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Addblock usage / private mode / not being logged in, could be seen as a strike?
- jfengel 6y ago
  Striking is the last resort of unions, but it's not their main mode of operation. Some unions can't strike at all. But they are often supported by laws which give them leverage without having to strike. Strikes are bad for everyone concerned. The union also has agreements with the company that give it power, again, precisely because strikes hurt everybody. Unions are mainly about giving workers a unified voice, in the democratic sense -- this is what most of us want, and we all agree to abide by it. The main job of a union is doing that voice, rather than having to leave that up to the many individuals, who usually lack the experience to do it well. It's nearly always routine, and if the word "strike" is even mentioned it's because things have seriously gone off the rails. Google could theoretically empower a users union to represent users, in the same way, and the government could beef that up with laws. It's not impossible. The impossible part is how you elect union leadership. Not with hundreds of millions of people. Unions are fractious enough as it is with tens of thousands of workers all united by similar work environments. The election would be nearly as hard as electing a US President -- more so than any individual Senator.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  People striking by not using Google would save Google money. Instead, people should all do a coordinated DDoS on Google, send thousands of mails per second, click on all ads, etc
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  People boycott products all the time. This would be no different. If you really wanted to have an impact, you get a few hundred businesses together and they all drop their contracts with said companies and find new vendors. Happens every day in business. People switch vendors all the time. Saying that Google is too big and it would never happen is a bit myopic don't you think?
proverbialbunny 6y ago
It has to do with size. On one end of the spectrum, there is unions which represent just a single company. On the other end of the spectrum there are governments that represent the consumers (and workers in theory) of an entire country. In the middle between the two extremes tend to be where the local maxima is. The ideal setup is industry wide governmental organizations and industry wide unions, so there is a fast food union that regulates the price all fast food companies pay their workers, an industry minimum wage instead of a global minimum wage. This is how Switzerland does it, and it works quite well. This way different industries get tailored results for their workers and businesses that works best for them. Likewise, because all companies have to follow these regulations, new non-union companies can't swoop in and undercut the older unionized companies running them out of business, which is what happened in the US and one of the reasons we have so few unions today. In this ideal setup there is industry wide governments representing consumers, so there is a fast food government that works on food regulations for customers. These governments have a larger federal government that passes guidelines smaller governments can follow. So eg, there is a country wide FDA that sets guidelines, and each kind of smaller government can choose to follow it or modify it as necessary to meet their specific situation. However, for this to work, customers exclusively need to be represented in the government, not businesses. Likewise, for this to work unions need to be represented by just the workers. There has to be a way to balance the demands of the workers vs the demands of the customers vs the demands of the businesses. If business fail over this, it's not handled well, so there needs to be some sort of pro business oversight as well (usually handled by a court system of some sort, but it doesn't have to be handled this way). For this to work properly there has to be severe limits and regulations on the power of unions and governmental organizations. Too much power to unions and goverments and businesses are restricted, which can be harmful to the larger economic economy, similar to how fishermen are limited in how many fish they can catch to not squash the ecosystem. Because of this there needs to be a government for businesses, eg minimum profit margin laws and what not. Workers and consumers can not milk the cow to its death, it needs to be healthy and happy too, so much so others are inspired to create a business. This kind of system does exist today, in part in many European countries. Switzerland and Nordic countries are the closest. The only difference is governments are based on party, and those larger governments have strong power over smaller industry regulators. If the larger government has too much power over industry regulators it opens the door for corruption. There needs to be a balance of power to hit a local maxima.