Normal people will only put up with this for so long. Either regulate it intelligently now, or expect actually scary regulation a decade or two from now.
There's nothing wrong with a law that says: "You cannot close a customer's account with no remediation, no recourse, and no explanation." What is Silicon Valley so afraid of there? How is that unreasonable?
>This victim-blaming needs to stop before the tech industry backlash hits. This is exactly why we need regulation.
Google will simply dilute the language of the regulation, to the point where they will simply add a "your account can be deleted at any time for any reason, proceed at your own risk" popup during sign-up, and people will happily hit continue/next.
Systemic reform can't exclusively happen top-down or bottom-up. There needs to be some of both. We need to stop giving Google free good-will on HN. Stop up-voting Google product launches, stop promoting Chrome, etc, etc.
After all, 15 years ago we still thought Google was "not evil". A lot can change in that time.
Agreed. Then they will learn that Google is not to be trusted with email and move to a provider that is (sort of like how kids migrated away from Facebook when their parents showed up, even though Facebook remains a dominant brand). Disruption occurs when an incumbent is bad at something which the disruptor beats them at. In this case, there is an opportunity for an email provider to disrupt Google by providing actual customer service. Protonmail is already making waves in this space (in addition to the encryption).
The reason I'm anti-regulation is that every law is a headache waiting to happen (and one more barrier to entry) where to me -the- beauty of the internet is that there's almost no barrier to entry once you have an internet-capable device. The more we regulate the internet, the more difficult doing something as simple as running a personal discussion forum becomes. Regulation is, at its best, a necessary evil, to be avoided until no other solution has proven viable. And there are plenty of other solutions for this particular problem.
And to clarify, I'm anti-Silicon Valley (IMO venture capital's expectation of high returns is the direct cause of many of the "evils of tech"). But I do tend to agree with the anti-regulation stance. IMO the problems people want to solve with regulation (even including GDPR) are better solved by better tech and organizations that align their incentives with those of their users.
It doesn't need to be (and shouldn't be). Just use an email provider that respects you as a customer and don't put all your eggs into one corporate basket (especially not one that treats you as nothing more than data cattle). Horror stories like this one will, over time, educate people that this behavior pattern is dangerous.
IMO self-hosting is the ideal because that aligns responsibility with incentive (and it can be done extremely cheaply), but if not, there are paid email services that actually treat the user as a customer.