> No! We need to demand more from Google (or, at least our lawmakers) [...] a fair "trial" of my account being suspended.

I wouldn't hold my breath. I encourage people to put their money where their mouth is. E.g., I host my email with Fastmail.com. is that free? No, and thank goodness.

Google's core business is selling your eyeballs to people who want to influence you. Their relationship to eyeball owners is statistical; as long as they are providing adequate quantities of wallet-connected eyeballs to the highest bidder, they do fine. This drives a fundamentally different culture than businesses that live and die by customer relationships. And culture is extremely hard to change.

I don't know Google's numbers offhand, but Twitter's revenue is about $1 per eyeball-pair per month, with per-user profit much lower. Think about your salary, and then think about how much work you'd be willing to do for a given account. By my numbers, handling one medium-sized customer service issue could easily wipe out an entire lifetime of profit.

And that's before we even get into the literal millions of scammers, jerks, loons, and mafiosi that would a) happily misuse a Google account, and b) will eagerly waste hours of customer service time lying up a storm. Every extra inch Google gives an actual well-intentioned user means a few hundred miles taken up by that lot. Which is expensive indeed.

So I am entirely grateful that I'm paying Fastmail $50/account/year. That builds a culture of wanting each customer to succeed. Of wanting customers to say good things to potential customers. Which means if that there's some bump in the relationship, they're going to at least hear me out. If you too want that, please pay people money for services.

Google (or Twitter) could offer on demand customer service. To open a ticket you pay $50. If you don't need customer service, you pay nothing.

Provides a perverse incentive to offer bad products and not solve common problems. Unless they had a clear policy to refund the support cost if it was their fault.

Totally. It's the customer service version of this: https://dilbert.com/strip/1995-11-13

One of those fonts is not like the other. Is that something Yahoo did?

Good question! I doubt it. Yahoo launched only 6 months before that comic strip was penned, and the number of daily internet users at the time was small. And their 1995 logo was... different: https://logos.fandom.com/wiki/Yahoo!

You can't change company culture that easily. Either user is the king or they are not - you can't have it both ways.

My personal email has been the same earthlink.net address for about 25 years now, and it’s been pretty worry-free in that time. My email client keeps all my email locally. I pay for service, I get that service. I guess it’s possible they’ll go out of business someday, but I’ll deal with it then. I don’t lose data over it.

How good is spam catching on those email providers? Because I'm disappointed as heck in my old Hotmail/Outlook account's spam catching, and if MS can't do it right what hope to smaller players have?

So far Fastmail has been quite good. My email address is ancient, so I get a ton of spam. (Over 99%, last I checked.) I see less spam with Fastmail than I did with my layered, carefully-tuned anti-spam filters.

> Their relationship to eyeball owners is statistical; as long as they are providing adequate quantities of wallet-connected eyeballs to the highest bidder, they do fine.

And people will leave Google for another free email service if even a small percent of people begin to lose their accounts.

Google definitely has an incentive to keep email functional.

Again, it's statistical, not personal. I agree that if they get up to the level of, say, accidentally banning 1%, that might be a problem. Maybe not, though, as changing email providers is a giant pain. But if it's 0.1%? Or even 0.01% per year? People will write it off as anomalous and stay with Google. However, that's ~100k-1m people per year who get totally screwed.

Me: 1k, oh well. 10k, glad it wasn't me. 100k? uh... I better look into back up solutions. 1m, I'm migrating now.

Average person: 1k, "what glitch?" 10k, "So what." 100k, "It didn't happen to me." 1m, "I don't use it for anything important anyway."

But with services this big people don’t look at the percentages, they look at the hard numbers. It doesn’t matter if 1M people are <0.1% of Google’s user base - if they lose their data people will start migrating off, because that’s a scary number, and the media will report “1 MILLION people lost their accounts!”, not “0.1% of people lost their accounts.”

And how would people know?

Google has ~ 1.5 billion users. If something happens to 1 in 1000 people, then a) it won't happen to most people, b) most people won't know anybody it happened to, and c) maybe it happens to a friend of a friend. If they hear about it, they will likely say, "Oh, I'm sure there's a reason."

A reporter might hear stories about people who lose their accounts. They might even find those people. But so what? Right here in this discussion we're hearing those stories. Could this be happening to a million people across the globe per year? Sure. Does anybody know the true number? Nope.

So if you could discover the hard number (which you can't), maybe you could get a tech reporter to write about it. Then Google PR would go into action. They'd say correctly that it's a small fraction of their users, that keeping everyone safe is a difficult problem, and that they work hard to make sure everybody who should have access does, but sometimes people get swept up in Google's crime-fighting. All of which is true! Then they'll turn back on the accounts of the people the reporter actually talked to. PR will say that they've made process changes that have solved the problem, the reporter will include the happy endings, and that will be the end of it.

Just for comparison, tobacco kills about a half-million people a year in the US. It's totally unnecessary, but it's profitable for the tobacco companies. As long as it's killing somebody else, people are basically fine with it. If they can be chill about that, they will certainly be chill about you losing your Google account. They'll think you probably did something.

> No! We need to demand more from Google

Demand all you want. Remember that you're not a customer, you're a user. Google offers their free services to keep you in their ecosystem, which allows them to collect more of your data and serve you more ads.

Users are much more disposable than paying customers. So what if they piss off a few users? As long as most people keep using Android, Chrome, Google Maps, Google search, YouTube, etc, there is no risk towards their bottom line.

Sure, you could try to go after them with government regulation, but they have tons of lobbying power. On top of that, even laws with the best intentions can often backfire and sometimes do more harm than good.

The only thing you can reasonably do is recognize your position and make sure you are never dependent on Google. You can still use Google services; just make sure you have a plan for when that suddenly stops being an option.

Even being a paying customer has little value. Remember that Jordan Peterson was #15 of Patreon with more than $1m revenue if I’m correct, yet he was removed abruptly, I think in the wake of being referenced in the Christchurch terrorist (together with his book being forbidden in NZ).

Even paying customers can be removed without trial.

This isn't quite correct.

Peterson wasn't removed, he left in protest, along with Sam Harris and others, after Carl Benjamin ("Sargon of Akkad") was removed over what Patreon considered to be a policy breach. [1]

I'm not expressing any position on whether or not the Carl Benjamin ban was valid, I'm just wanting to correct the record.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/patreon-crowdfunding-plat...

> I have a business that relies on a Chrome extension to be on their web store.

Except some very few regulated things, no store has an obligation to carry this or that brand of product. Even in retail.

The distinction is that a mostly sane person decided to stock Hot Pockets at the grocery store and will likely continue doing so and if they stop it won't be for a random reason.

The way it works with Android apps is if some random code quality shell script of questionable quality flags your app, the app will be removed and you will get a lifetime developer ban from Google. There is no human in the loop and no appeals process.

Because there's a monopoly for Android apps, there is no reason for them to ever improve customer/developer service.

An excellent analogy would be getting banned for life by a programmers union if anything you write ever fails a valgrind test. Doesn't matter if its a bug in that revision of the valgrind test and there will never be any human contact in the process.

"I've been banned from google and I don't even know why" is a weekly discussion topic on android development forums.

Even funnier is Google implements guilt by association. So if you have a similar email address or ip address to someone who gets banned, the same shell scripts will lifetime ban your account under their ban evasion policy.

Google Play does not have a monopoly on Android apps. It's not even included on phones sold in some countries. Numerous apps, including high profiles one such as Fortnite, have not been distributed in the Play Store and there are several alternatives appstores around.

Fortnite just launched on the Play Store because of how impossible Google has made it to distribute Android apps outside of Play.

> because of how impossible Google has made it to distribute Android apps outside of Play.

Or because of how much of a larger audience the Play Store has.

Installing an APK from a website has never been an easier process. I do not see how Google can simplify it any more. You are asked 2 things:

- Can we allow your browser to download files?

- Can we install this app on your device?

Google set Project Zero on finding exploits for the Fortnite installer and then engaged in a media campaign to promote how scary installing it was.

I would say in addition to the "scary stuff" warnings Google employs on devices, they went out of their way to harm any serious contender for outside distribution.

Epic also went on a significant campaign to be allowed to distribute through Play, but utilize their own payment provider, but Google's monopoly wouldn't budge:

Google's Play Store demands aren't about security, they're about the 30% taxation.

> You are asked 2 things [...]

Can you provide references?

On at least four Android phones to allow installing unsigned APKs I've had warnings about "Scary Stuff"[tm]* if I proceed...

* I paraphrase...

The “Scary Stuff” warnings are important because anyone competent will ignore them and anyone not competent will be scared away. As they should be, because potential for abuse here is rife.

It works.

Every time a banned developer makes the front page of HN, it turned out that the company had hired a contractor or employee who had been previously banned for malware.

So the algorithm decides that an app you wrote was "malware" by some arbitrary bullshit screening process.

Now you've lost your job and you're banned for life from making android apps?

SOUNDS UTTERLY FANTASTIC! (actually sounds totally evil)

While true, no store has the ability to prevent other stores from opening in the same city either

Your comparison of Google Play being like a normal store, would then make Android the town the store is in.

Would your position be that Walmart should be allowed to pay off the town to prevent Kroger from opening?

Like any other app not from the play store Google Play allows you to install other app marketplaces. You just got a warning the first time you install the alternative store.

It's just incredibly hard and not worth it to start an alternative legit store unless you are huge with something that customers really want and that is not available somewhere else. (ie: Epic Games with the Epic Store for Fortnite)

>>It's just incredibly hard and not worth it to start an alternative legit store unless you are huge

Even amazon failed at this, so it is not just incredibly hard, the road blokes Google puts in place for people wanting to create another store is defacto impossible. Further they they are more extreme then what Microsoft did in the 1990's with IE that caused an AntiTrust violation and they were forced to easily allow other browsers and allow them to be changed as the default

I am not sure why Google can get way with what they do, even less sure how Apple gets away with it

Guessing tech companies learned their lesson in the 90s and started sending lobbyist to Washington.

In that case Apple fits in your example, not Google, as they don't prevent you to install any other store.

This also makes me think that it's just too dangerous to use your long-time personal account to host Chrome extensions or Android apps that you financially depend on. The account for that should do absolutely nothing else, to have the minimum risk of it being arbitrarily shut down for something unrelated.

This also means e.g. ensuring that their recovery email address and phone number are separate, as Google has in the past linked accounts via them and shut down all linked accounts.

If you set up shell corporations appropriately, there's no problem. Only individual people have trouble.

Agreed. The parent description makes me think of how people used to talk about "justice" before. It was at the whim of others, and only the powerful had certain access to it. But at some point, we nationalized the carriage of justice, and so we could all come to depend on it (on both the giving and receiving end)

I hope we get to the point where something in the commons (government or whatever), can offer comparable assurances about digital things that are becoming critical infrastructure in our lives

I fully support your sentiment, but you're not in opposition with the grandparent you're referring to. He didn't say that that's what he'd like Google to be (ultimately unreliable). He said that that's what it is, which is true. We should demand and expect more, but until the demands are met, well, they're not met. Nit pick.

ah good point, thx :)

As noted many, many times. Their walled garden, their rules. If we accept their edicts on speech, acceptable behavior, etc and accept that they can - and will - eject anyone without review, appeal, or even acknowledgement, we need to celebrate our internet overlords and definitely not say anything that might irritate them or get us reported by others we irritate.

Welcome to the new old world. :(

Ideally we'd ban a company from making both hardware, operating systems, and app stores. Walled garden ecosystems should be totally illegal.

>I have a business that relies on a Chrome extension to be on their web store

No, you should operate on the basis that google can stop doing business with you for anytime for any reason and make plan accordingly.

I'm not involved in anything like that but to me that just sounds like a business risk you have to take when making money off of the google store.

> No! We need to demand more from Google

If there is any need, it is from your government (wherever it is) to go break the Google self-supporting monopolies.

You can try to demand that a private company offers you high quality service for free, but I wouldn't recommend wasting your time. Alternatively, you can try to use other services, but again, those multiple self-reinforcing monopolies are an issue.

Hey, I too run a business that requires an extension. There are ways to distribute that don't include the chrome webstore, and ways to run them that don't include chrome(like chromium and kiwi on Android). It actually even increases conversion rates in some cases not using their walled garden.

If your extension even gets flagged, they will disable it or uninstall it from all browsers automatically. And it will not return to normal automatically.

Actually I'm wondering if you can use the GDPR for this. It gives you the right to ask for a copy of your data. This counts for places where you don't have an explicit account so presumably o could get a copy of all data from my account even if I lose access?

Probably, but depending on that rather than making regular backups is a bit mad. https://takeout.google.com/ even lets you schedule regular archiving.

If you have 100GB+ with Google, takeout doesn't work. Either you have to manually download files 2GB at a time reauthenticating each time, or try a 50GB download the times out on the server side as gets cancelled with auth error. There's no way to but a physical backup or run a long running process to fetch your data reliably over the course of the week.

It might work if you get an GCE VM and crossload your Google takeout to cloud storage and then download using cloud storage APIs.

Looking at the choices on that takeout page, I realized that there were a number of Google services I didn't event know about: "Google Arts & Culture", "Crisis User Reports", "Handsfree", "Textcube".