I had this exact comparison pop up into my mind yesterday when I read this, yet another, news of Google flexing on someone.

Actions of both tech companies and content publishers make it clear as day that they have zero respect for people. Well, since consumers keep returning to them, they evidently don't have much respect for themselves either.

Since when have we not looked at capitalist entities as abusers and exploiters?

No one wants to be in this situation wrt megacorps and their stranglehold on the internet, free speech, and so many livelihoods. Putting the onus on consumers to fix this is hilarious and naive.

While I agree that the onus should not be on consumers, it’s generally not bad advice to say “avoid those who abuse you”. it would be better, of course, to say “avoid those who abuse you… but I’ll be trying to protect you”

Look at it as a part of the portfolio of approaches we take to address this problem. It may not solve the problem on its own, but it's an important step to take. And arguably a necessary one; a great deal of what gives these companies so much power is that people simply can't imagine trying to do without them and don't even try.

Just because people say to stop giving them so much money and attention doesn't mean that they think that's the whole solution. But if you aren't making even a token effort to stop giving them so much money and attention, you're probably more part of the problem than the solution.

If you think these companies are a problem... take action. If you aren't willing to even so much as cancel a streaming subscription or take responsibility for backing up your own photos or whatever the issue is, you're sending major signals to the legislative system or whoever else it is you expect to swoop in and save you that you don't care enough for them to need to do anything either.

I don't mean this to be absolutist, either. I use Google in a few places, even despite my distrust and distaste of them. But even there, I hold them at arm's length. If they completely nuked my current accounts, it would mostly be an inconvenience. Worst bit would be the ~$20 of apps I'd have to repurchase. (I'd lose more than that but mostly I could just let them go.)

It's likely not 'tech' but abusive customer interaction practises. Don't need tech for that, just an a-hole with an MBA.

If there was a screwdriver analogy, we could turn this in to: "If all you have is an MBA, every customer looks like it needs to be screwed".

All of this is of course fine banter, but there does seem to be a pattern where the end-of-the-chain responsible party just has some generic business related schooling that results in questionable practises in the name of profit, or in some cases just growth (or some derivative).

It's not the customer support agent that woke up one day and thought "how can I screw over the next customer I get on the line", it's probably not the engineer that made the software in such a way that it just screws over everyone who comes in contact with it. Middle management probably doesn't have much to do with it either; they are often just doing what their manager told them, and don't want to go against that and risk their position. They are often not responsible for the top-down policy either... so that leaves us with the people that feed a bad policy to the rest of the company.

More critically, it's people that claim positions of authority while not having any clue of how real work actually gets done, making protecting their own position their primary goal. These people excel at playing politics such that nobody is responsible for any given problem, so once you get a critical mass it becomes a stable situation where little can change.

If you created a new company with ten random people from this thread, it would not suffer this banning problem as everyone would be aware of this failure mode. But if you fed the same people one by one into Google, they would each either succumb to corporate politics or quit, and at the end nothing would change.

These kind of bullshit jobs are the best argument for basic income. Our society would be better off if they were paid to stay home and stay out of the way.

If you don't like the way these businesses handle (or, more accurately, don't handle) customer support, you should avoid doing business with them.

Delete your accounts and shop elsewhere.

Oh hey it's the "you should leave him" guy. As with abusive spouses, there are usually circumstances trapping people there. Not least the unequal power relationship.

This is a circumstance where society, in the form of government, needs to weigh in to force tech giants to behave more sanely, because only society as a whole is a bigger fish than Google, Facebook, etc.

No one is forced to do business with Google.

If you want to sell Android apps, you are. Yes, I know Android allows installs from sources other than Play Store, but if you want to be popular, you have to be in Play Store.

I'm actually surprised/impressed with how successful that strategy has been for Google. I've always considered sideloading and alternate app stores to be an advantage for Android, but Google's store is effectively a monopoly anyway.

> If you want to sell Android apps, you are.

No one is forced to sell Android apps, therefore, no one is forced to do business with Google.

Statements like this are technically correct, but not very useful to discussion of the problem of Google and other large corporations being in control of such large pieces of widely-used infrastructure that they effectively decide what kinds of things others will create.

Well sure, they could go flip burgers instead.

The parent's comment is so infuriating: yes, you can chose something else instead of Google, but it hardly matters because all of them are more or less equally terrible. Which, I guess, only makes sense in the competitive market: way too terrible or way too pleasant entities go bust (for slightly different reasons), what's left are entities that are just "good enough", and there is not much reason for them to try and improve the quality.

So I’m going to say “yes they absolutely are”

And you’re going to argue with me on the semantic definition of “force”, ignoring the sheer power Google (and a few other tech companies) wield over the technological word, which now encompasses basically all commerce and industry to varying degrees. The smartphone market alone means you’re forced to deal with Google.

Single line pithy comments set up these situations. They’re not good communication really, in my opinion.

It is absolutely possible to make an app that doesn't support iOS or Android and runs on weird unpopular Linux smartphones, and thereby bow down to nobody.

Except your landlord when rent comes due.