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We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolis

We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue. Facebook is exactly the same way. When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.

robotresearcher 6y ago
For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors). Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want? Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
- bluefirebrand 6y ago
  Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      This is a bit of a tautology. Of course if they spend more on service than the service makes them the margin is negative. But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a small country as a rounding error. That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer better service for it, they would still be making absurd amounts of money.
    - rsj_hn 6y ago
      IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to "scale". Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.
  - strombofulous 6y ago
    Google has not done that in many years. "These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
    - minikites 6y ago
      But the reason they created it was so they could. It doesn't matter that they changed their mind later.
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they don't do that. Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result? I'm betting they do.
      - username90 6y ago
        Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.
        bluefirebrand 6y ago
        The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot of gray area and there is a lot of information contained with an email that is not the "message" of the email. Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data? Ok.
        username90 6y ago
        > Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data? Yes, here is the official statement: > Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in... Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
  - gerash 6y ago
    I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse. That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not. If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history? The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario. Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
    - bluefirebrand 6y ago
      > why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. What does this have to do with anything I said? I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity
      - gerash 6y ago
        I assumed you're implying mal intentions. Otherwise, sure it is ad supported and not a charity.
- deleted 6y ago
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- MikeUt 6y ago
  Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
  - robotresearcher 6y ago
    I don't think public safety standards are the same thing as support level for free email, subscription music, etc. We can all easily name multiple email and subscription music providers.
    - MikeUt 6y ago
      What about giant app stores that control almost all consumer spending in those markets? How many businesses can survive being banned by both Apple and Google's stores? Or even by just one? Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you can easily get a new email address.
      - robotresearcher 6y ago
        Just to be clear, you are talking about the quality of b2b services, between parties that have entered a business relationship, not consumer protection.
        MikeUt 6y ago
        b2b issues greatly affect consumers - there's no fabled "consumer choice" if a handful of businesses are allowed to dominate or decide who may enter their market/app store. And when so many businesses are at the mercy of a few giant companies, we probably shouldn't deny them protection with the "it's a b2b matter" dismissal.
  - II2II 6y ago
    The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly opaque to the consumer and affects their safety. The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control. Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
- malinens 6y ago
  Actually their support in gmail is non-existing. I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support
shakezula 6y ago
I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time. It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that. It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
- sethammons 6y ago
  Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.
  - Swizec 6y ago
    Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs. You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it? (not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
    - ycombigator 6y ago
      Profiling you to increase revenue.
    - belorn 6y ago
      It would raise some flags if my bank representative or doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to do so, would not. Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose. A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.
kodah 6y ago
The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity. Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
superkuh 6y ago
Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.
cycloptic 6y ago
>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
- username90 6y ago
  There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
  - cycloptic 6y ago
    I think that's completely different from what was said in the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple for their behavior with the app stores and there are actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the same about them running a free email or social media service that has crappy support.
iooi 6y ago
There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?
- falcolas 6y ago
  A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
- dr_hooo 6y ago
  Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
  - iooi 6y ago
    Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free? * they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better
    - freeone3000 6y ago
      You pay for a license to be a developer on the app store. You pay for a phone. You pay for apps on the app store. You pay monthly for Stadia. YouTube aside, these are not free!
    - dal 6y ago
      You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to be able to target you with personalized advertising. They use your data to train their AI and build better algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead they offer you some free services.
    - stale2002 6y ago
      > Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free? Providing something for free is not a defense against anti-trust law. The most famous example showing this, was regarding internet explorer, which was provided for free, yet anti-trust law effected it anyway.
ForHackernews 6y ago
Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent. IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
schoolornot 6y ago
> they would be spending billions on customer support Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
diob 6y ago
This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort: "If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)." Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic. And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies. Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
skissane 6y ago
> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law. The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-to-make-censoring-of-social-media-accounts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...
mrmonkeyman 6y ago
Citizens of the free world, you actually have a choice in the matter. Don't use facebook. Never did, no one cares. Stop relying on "gubmint" to handle your diaper changes. Think for and act by yourselves.
CivBase 6y ago
> We need to politicize this issue. We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
- oblio 6y ago
  Trust busting is regulation...
  - CivBase 6y ago
    By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly state that companies can't do something or have to do something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of 1934. "Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest. Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.
eldavido 6y ago
No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them. Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents. Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change. "Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself. "Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines. "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation. Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits. What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
- esja 6y ago
  Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
  - eldavido 6y ago
    You're probably right. More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation. I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
throwawaysea 6y ago
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.
leephillips 6y ago
“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.” I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
deleted 6y ago
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robotresearcher 6y ago

For counterpoint, they provide products like Gmail for free at point of use because the support costs are very low (amongst other factors). Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want? Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.

bluefirebrand 6y ago
Counter-counterpoint They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  Sure, that's absolutely true. But the margin would be eroded if they provided much better customer service for unpaid Gmail. At some service level, the margin would be negative.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    This is a bit of a tautology. Of course if they spend more on service than the service makes them the margin is negative. But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a small country as a rounding error. That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer better service for it, they would still be making absurd amounts of money.
  - rsj_hn 6y ago
    IMO the problem is the dismissive attitude towards human support where it is viewed only as a roadblock to "scale". Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.
- strombofulous 6y ago
  Google has not done that in many years. "These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
  - minikites 6y ago
    But the reason they created it was so they could. It doesn't matter that they changed their mind later.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    All this shows me is that Google pinky promises that they don't do that. Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result? I'm betting they do.
    - username90 6y ago
      Google engineers aren't exactly known to be loyal to the company, if Google didn't keep their promises about stuff like this I'm pretty sure it would get leaked quickly.
      - bluefirebrand 6y ago
        The language of the "promise" is such that there is a lot of gray area and there is a lot of information contained with an email that is not the "message" of the email. Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data? Ok.
        username90 6y ago
        > Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data? Yes, here is the official statement: > Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products. https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in-the-enterprise-g-suites-gmail-and-consumer-gmail-to-more-closely-align/ https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in... Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
- gerash 6y ago
  I'm all for regulations to avoid these account closures with no recourse. That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not. If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history? The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario. Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
  - bluefirebrand 6y ago
    > why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. What does this have to do with anything I said? I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity
    - gerash 6y ago
      I assumed you're implying mal intentions. Otherwise, sure it is ad supported and not a charity.
deleted 6y ago
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MikeUt 6y ago
Would I prefer government enforce food safety standards, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want? Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
- robotresearcher 6y ago
  I don't think public safety standards are the same thing as support level for free email, subscription music, etc. We can all easily name multiple email and subscription music providers.
  - MikeUt 6y ago
    What about giant app stores that control almost all consumer spending in those markets? How many businesses can survive being banned by both Apple and Google's stores? Or even by just one? Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you can easily get a new email address.
    - robotresearcher 6y ago
      Just to be clear, you are talking about the quality of b2b services, between parties that have entered a business relationship, not consumer protection.
      - MikeUt 6y ago
        b2b issues greatly affect consumers - there's no fabled "consumer choice" if a handful of businesses are allowed to dominate or decide who may enter their market/app store. And when so many businesses are at the mercy of a few giant companies, we probably shouldn't deny them protection with the "it's a b2b matter" dismissal.
- II2II 6y ago
  The first and second case deals with issues that are mostly opaque to the consumer and affects their safety. The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control. Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
malinens 6y ago
Actually their support in gmail is non-existing. I work for European regional free e-mail provider (also ad supported) and we have free phone support for free users where You can talk to real support people who know product in 5 different languages. Google abuses it's dominant power by making basically impossible to get support

shakezula 6y ago

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time. It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that. It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.

sethammons 6y ago
Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.
- Swizec 6y ago
  Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs. You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it? (not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
  - ycombigator 6y ago
    Profiling you to increase revenue.
  - belorn 6y ago
    It would raise some flags if my bank representative or doctor ask for a photo copy of my passport. Asking to simply see it, given that they have a specific reason to do so, would not. Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose. A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.

kodah 6y ago

The problem seems to be that spam (and fraud) are increasing, especially in the domain of identity. Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?

superkuh 6y ago

Maybe instead of regulations we could spend the money as a society on non-coercive mitigations like education about technology that would allow people to see that centralized corporate services will always end up this way.

cycloptic 6y ago

>If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.

username90 6y ago
There is no competition if you want to sell phone apps. You have to sell via google store and apple store. Foregoing one of the stores drops 50% of your userbase that you can't reach with the other store, so you have to do both or leave money on the table.
- cycloptic 6y ago
  I think that's completely different from what was said in the GP post, but I'll address it anyway. I agree there should be anti-trust action taken against Google and Apple for their behavior with the app stores and there are actually solid claims to be made there. I can't say the same about them running a free email or social media service that has crappy support.

iooi 6y ago

There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?

falcolas 6y ago
A monopoly does not require 100% market share. It requires a majority market share and using that position against its competitors (which can be argued for, given how easily non-google emails end up in spam folders).
dr_hooo 6y ago
Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?
- iooi 6y ago
  Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free? * they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better
  - freeone3000 6y ago
    You pay for a license to be a developer on the app store. You pay for a phone. You pay for apps on the app store. You pay monthly for Stadia. YouTube aside, these are not free!
  - dal 6y ago
    You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to be able to target you with personalized advertising. They use your data to train their AI and build better algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead they offer you some free services.
  - stale2002 6y ago
    > Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free? Providing something for free is not a defense against anti-trust law. The most famous example showing this, was regarding internet explorer, which was provided for free, yet anti-trust law effected it anyway.

ForHackernews 6y ago

Can we just break them up? If the problem is monopolistic behaviour, just end their monopoly by chopping them up into pieces. There's plenty of historical precedent. IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.

schoolornot 6y ago

> they would be spending billions on customer support Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.

diob 6y ago

This is going to be tough politically to fight. If I had to guess the tactic that would be used to fight it from the other side is something of the sort: "If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)." Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic. And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies. Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.

skissane 6y ago

> We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies. Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law. The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-to-make-censoring-of-social-media-accounts https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...

mrmonkeyman 6y ago

Citizens of the free world, you actually have a choice in the matter. Don't use facebook. Never did, no one cares. Stop relying on "gubmint" to handle your diaper changes. Think for and act by yourselves.

CivBase 6y ago

> We need to politicize this issue. We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.

oblio 6y ago
Trust busting is regulation...
- CivBase 6y ago
  By "regulation" I'm referring to laws which explicitly state that companies can't do something or have to do something - like the GDPR or the Communications Act of 1934. "Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest. Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.

eldavido 6y ago

No! What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want. I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them. Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents. Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change. "Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself. "Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines. "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation. Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits. What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".

esja 6y ago
Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.
- eldavido 6y ago
  You're probably right. More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation. I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.

throwawaysea 6y ago

If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.

leephillips 6y ago

“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.” I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.

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