Thanks!
> Not sure being corporate centric makes this problem any worse? If you had other kinds of organisation, you'd still have to deal with abuse and fraud?
I think it's definitely not unique to big corps, but an emergent property of a distributed and homogenous system of self interested agents, probably. It feels very game theoretical, at least. What's clear is these systems are becoming ubiquitous rapidly.
Anyway, if my Google account gets locked today, for whatever reason, I am very seriously screwed. Google's human appeal process is best-effort at best, I know people personally who have been locked out for life. Now, I have the luxury to blame myself because I should have bought a domain and so on, but society at large doesn't have that foresight/insight.
Not sure the homogenity is necessary?
To an extent, the market delivers what people are demanding.
For most people, Google's package of cheap or even free services with minimal hassle in the common case, but almost no recourse in bad cases, is compelling.
And for many it's a step up from having everything locally: I'd bet that more people lose their local data than get locked out of Google?
Oh, nice catch, I actually meant to write heterogeneous.
> I'd bet that more people lose their local data than get locked out of Google?
Probably. There's definitely some low hanging fruit/middle ground though. We desperately need to have ownership of the address itself, so we can transfer to different providers. Either with your own domain, or a domain provided by a truly neutral party, similar to phone numbers.
Not sure being corporate centric makes this problem any worse? If you had other kinds of organisation, you'd still have to deal with abuse and fraud? Any people doing weird, unusual stuff, look inherently more suspicious. That's a fact of life in meatspace, too.
There might be some utopian, ideal way to organise activity so that non-mainstream stuff ain't suspicious.
But I would count that as a great feature of that ideal way; not as a deficiency in the corporate way. Just because this deficiency of the corporate way seems to be a common deficiency of most means of organisation that have been tried.
(Keep in mind, this isn't all or nothing. Softening the tendency might be enough of a relief, without having to eliminate it completely.)