Google is never going to improve the situation out of the goodness of their corporate heart (if such a thing were even to exist).
[1] https://www.commoncause.org/find-your-representative/
[2] https://nypost.com/2022/03/29/biden-doj-backs-senate-antitru...
Pretty much, the amount of effort you put into your communication is a reflection of how important the issue is, and how important it is to you.
Which kind of goes hand-in-hand with lobbyists. Companies don't pay them millions of dollars to send emails or rant on web forums.
Order of importance was (at least in 2011):
1. In person meeting 2. Physical letter 3. Phone call
Then go to district events that your rep will be at, get the district manager to introduce you to the rep.
That's way better than calling the same phone line all the wackos call
There have been a few occasions where I would gladly have paid Google/Twitter/Apple to answer my questions.
The worst part was the complete and absolute silence from Twitter. I tried opening a support ticket and got no response. DAYS later, I got an automated email about what I needed to do, but the instructions didn't even work. Eventually I was able to get my account back about a week after that by going through some cumbersome verification process.
All for sharing a dumb space meme.
In that moment, if I could pay $10 to talk to an actual human being who could resolve my problem or at least tell me what I needed to do, even if it was via web-chat, I would gladly have done so.
Living in a liberal democracy has made me so used to the system working mostly fairly that these interactions with a ‘fiefdom’ introduce some sort of cognitive dissonance.
We want to switch now to professional and can’t despite fulfilling all the criteria they tell you need.
I would like to see legislation forcing detailed explanations of bans though.
It's more head scratching to me that people think it's going to be easier to pass legislation than to go through the existing legal channels when a company's policies are causing damages. You sue them.
Every business needs some kind of legal advice, they don't have to be on retainer. You probably did have one or more lawyers that your leadership was in contact with for particulars. Every business I've worked at has dealt with legal bullshit at some point (even the 3-4 person startups!).
It's also a big part of many people's social lives these days (like it or not).
I would imagine any broad-based regulation around recourse for account locks is likely to start with the individual B2C user due to how many more of them there are (essentially everyone, even if you only count Apple and Google - legislation would of course cover every provider).
The bigger issue is that I don't even know where or how you would start with this. Ironically, there's a certain amount of comfort in knowing that your data is behind an unresponsive brick wall these days as it makes it harder/impossible for someone to socially engineer their way in. The downsides to that are many and varied, and what the post references.
Imagine I’m a trillionaire real estate mogul. I have 1,000,000 properties under my domain across the world. Some will, inevitably, not get the upkeep they need and a situation like the apartment building in Miami occurs. Let’s say even that no one dies, to be generous. Another building the electrical is jacked up and held together by paper clips, regularly leaving residents without power. Another one has grey water coming out of every faucet.
The government comes in and goes “hey, a bunch of stuff isn’t up to code. You can’t have buildings like this.” I then proceed to go, “well, it’s unreasonable to expect me to address every problem. I’m just too large of a company with too many assets. I’d need to hire a small army to manage it all.” The government goes, “huh, that’s reasonable. Well I guess just automate what you can and do your best!”
That’s absolutely ridiculous, right?
This appeal is required to be real, actually reviewing the content or conduct in question to determine if it violates the law or terms and conditions. If there is enough information to conclude that no violation occur, the company is required to reinstate the account.
If after the appeal, the user is still not satisfied they can appeal to one of a set of government approved arbitrators, who will listen to the dispute and decide the case. It is the user who gets to decide which of the arbitrators will be used (among those certified for the relevant category of platform). The company always handles its own expenses associated with this process, and if the company loses, they must reimburse reasonable fees and expenses incurred by the user.
These appeal processes also apply to removed content, not just account suspension/termination.
There is an exception for "small and micro enterprises" though.
The main downside of this law is that its primary purpose is to create a DCMA++ framework over in Europe, but it still looks to have a much better balance of concerns that the laws here in the US have.
What you want is human judgement, but it will be hard to legislate that. What can easily happen is the human parroting back the underlying reasons for the decision. In this case "We have reviewed your case, and according to our records the account is associated with the problematic account"
I have had this happen to me in bureaucratic situations with no computers involved.
What we want isn't review of automated decisions, what we want is openness, transperancy and clarity in the process. The problem people have isn't so much the appeals process it is the opaqueness and seeming arbitrary nature of the whole thing.
If the signals used are made public, fraudsters will win every time. It’s the same with search engines- if they publish how a score is calculated, people will game it immediately.
Maybe the signals should be required to go through a review with authorities? Idk.
That isn’t to say there shouldn’t be some kind of way to escalate an appeal to a real human.
Of course keeping the fraudsters from DDOSing the crap out the appeals process will be a challenge! Because I could see them doing that…
But that's what a public court gets you.
No, I'm sorry, this is a horrible, horrible idea. As long as these companies are targeted by automated spambots, they need automated systems to counteract and remove spam accounts. That's just the reality of the internet arms race in the last 20 years. If you make them manually review everything, you hand a victory over to the spammers and degrade service quality for everyone.
>and have a proper appeals process.
This is a much better idea. Do this and require them to have a functioning customer service department.
Edited the comment to reflect this - thanks!
I worked on an abuse prevention system in the past and know the challenges very well, except my company actually put in the effort to respond to every appeal and compensate affected customers for their troubles.
Yes, humans are expensive, and spammers will try to game the appeals process, too - but it's simply a cost of doing business.
> Yes, humans are expensive, and spammers will try to game the appeals process, too - but it's simply a cost of doing business.
Another Hacker News commentator¹ had a good suggestion for this problem:
> Microsoft have a better solution, or at least one of their departments does. You pay for support questions and if it turns out it’s actually Microsoft’s fault they refund you the fee.
If users paid some up-front fee for the appeal, similar to the above, regular users would have the opportunity to appeal an automated ban (if the appeal was done properly). On the other hand, spammers and other malicious actors would have to pay money for the opportunity to attempt to game the system.
The problem in account termination cases would also be that:
1) they can claim they've reviewed the ban, that it's legitimate and they're refusing to disclose the reasons behind it to avoid helping people circumvent the ban, while in reality they didn't do any investigation at all. Proper enforcement should be able to pierce through this veil (by forcing them to disclose the reasons and data behind the bank to the regulator, a neutral third-party), but it's missing and nothing suggests it's going to get any better.
2) given that businesses are still allowed to essentially "fire" customers at will, and changing that is impossible due to wide-ranging repercussions, nothing prevents them from "firing" you anyway. Proper antitrust enforcement is needed here (so that you're not allowed to "fire" customers this way) but that's missing as well.
All it would take is to reestablish that you are the sole owner of your information that is your property, as has been established by the courts, and it cannot be sold without a formal contract, e.g., the way real estate is transferred; and that any tracking is illegal stalking and wire fraud (because it is) just like tapping someone’s phone would be since it is using the public internet. Alternately, these companies can stop relying on the public internet for illegal criminal actions and fraud, and build their own internet if they want to track and stalk people.
The law exists, it doesn’t matter what other laws you make when none, even the fundamental Constitutional law, is not enforced and simply ignored. We have too many people who have these narcissistic perceptions that the real problem is that their pet legislation hasn’t been added to the mountain of legislation; when the real problem is people trying to control others, some in business, some through legislation.
If the general public does not recognize this soon, the clutter of legalization will become a prison, if it isn’t already.
[1]https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/12/20/why-new-y...
It's not hard to argue that all algorithmic decisions impact people's lives though, Facebook for example, prioritizes certain friends' posts over others... it doesn't seem like a stretch to say this could actually impact who you're close to.
This happens everywhere, not just Big Tech. Even as humans, we try to handle the 99% and ignore the 1%.
I still don’t understand what anyone is proposing - force companies to provide support against their will?
What I worry about most is that human support requirements will apply to smaller companies and essentially guarantee supremacy of big tech since no startup would ever be able to disrupt them.
Like we force telecom companies to serve rural areas against their will.
Like we force construction companies to use safety gear and have insurance for injuries against their will.
Like we force credit companies to provide mandatory disclosures.
Like we force airlines to do what the people in the control tower tell them to do.
And so on. The entire concept of a corporation is a legal fiction, a privilege granted by the state that enables them to pretend they even have something analogous to free will. Without the consent of the state companies wouldn’t exist at all. Maybe we should do a better job of reminding them of that.
Yes. This happens all the time in all sortes of industries. But people on HN think that tech companies are somehow different and shouldn't be held to the normal rules that other companies have adhered to for decades, generations, and centuries.
That's what laws are: forcing people to do things they would otherwise not do.
But that's only part of it. A business account might not fall within these rules, and Google can enforce them anyway (after human review) with very little recourse available.
Breaking the App store duopoly is the solution.
Not really. We a comparable situation in a lot of different industries; if a large companies serves tens of thousands of customers and get hundreds of thousands of malicious requests, they're going to do some filtering and it will lead to some people getting stuck in the cracks, even if it's just 0.01%. More app stores won't solve this; if enough developers would be burned, the problem would solve itself on its own.
That's not to say that I like the current situation, but from what I see it's likely that the actual number of incidents is low (compared to the number of Google's customers) and a third or fourth store won't change this.
I think that forcing human recourse _is_ the solution. This problem is much bigger than just the “App store duopoly” axe. A law that required the ability to perform all account actions/appeals/etc realtime with another human (phone, chat, etc) would’ve also minimized the need for the recent unsubscription laws as well since the hassle would’ve been much less in the first place. These are the kind of foundational human-centric business laws we need instead of the reactionary hyper-focused ones that don’t address root problems and usually just wind up further cementing incumbents.
I don't think this is enforceable nor I think it's even possible to have such legislature.
At the end of the day Google has every right to decide what they put and what they don't put on their store, with whom they do business and with whom they don't.
> With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such.
Calling an online application store an utility seems quite a stretch.
De-googling and de-duopoling is the answer to these situations. At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.
Refusing to have say, Telegram, on your app store is similar to not allowing a telco to operate. Also as much as I dislike Meta, if Apple/Google decided to remove WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook, that would disrupt a lot of lives. Many businesses heavily rely on WhatsApp, more than they'd rely on landlines in the past.
In the US at least, where these companies are headquartered, every example you gave has an alternative that doesn't require an app.
There might be an argument for more regulation, but calling apps utilities most definitely is not one.
There are countless U.S. examples where an app (native and/or web) is the only practical interface you have to a company or service.
For example: What's the phone number to YouTube customer service if someone needs to discuss a misunderstanding about a copyright strike?
Eh, just de-googling is probably enough. This isn't really a walled garden problem, this is mostly a Google problem. Apple can do stupid things, for sure, but you can reach a human there. And they definitely don't have the same Google algorithmic "scorched earth" account banning style.
The sentiment is basically correct. Enforcing a ban on stores being able to control who they do business with is a radical break with all precedent and violates freedom of association. All stores have always had the ability to kick out any buyer or seller for any reason whatsoever short of systematic discrimination against specific protected minorities. Whether or not any particular seller thinks this is a morally optimal situation or bad for their personal business isn't going to change the centuries of history behind this.
The actual problem here isn't the arbitrariness with which Google bans sellers or the false positive rate of their decision-making process. The problem is the device vendor, OS vendor, and app store vendor are all the same company, and there are, practically speaking, only two options for the entire mobile market. Solving this is basic antitrust enforcement. Force competition for app distribution platforms. At least Android allows you to sideload and has F-Droid, but the situation is still anticompetitive and bad for both consumers and sellers.
And yes, with all respect to mobile app developers, access to a selling platform is not a utility. You don't need to be an Android developer to meet the basic necessities of life. It doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't do anything to make the situation better, but this drive to call everything a utility is not helping.
So now do we say that companies have the innate right to make profit without any regard for the public good? That profits are more important than what voters in a democracy want?
Correct. AdSense worked the exact same way on YouTube. They are just doing the same thing with apps on their platform so really nothing has changed here.
These companies can do business with whoever they want to. You can criticise them, scream at them, protest, etc but they will never change, unless you split them all up.
So perhaps the real solution is to split up these giants..?
The fact Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Verizon, and others [1], etc are even allowed to exist in their current forms is absolutely bonkers to me. The outsized roles and influence they have on the economy and their individual markets just highlights that the government is incompetent or willfully corrupt.
[1]: Just a random selection of giants I can think of in a split second. But there are tons of other companies that dominate other less-sexy markets that should absolutely broken up.
A couple of years ago, the New York Times ran an interesting article where someone tried to live an ordinary day without interacting in any way with Google. The result was that it simply wasn't possible.
Yes.
If there were more competition, there would also be alternatives that companies like in the subject case could choose from and which would deter companies from making mistakes in order to prevent loss of market share.
A good measure should be that anything should have more than 3 equal competitors, is 4+ search engine companies of equal scale, 4+ App marketplaces for 4+ phone OS/hardware makers, that can operate on 4+ telecom services, etc.
And that transfer of data and services between each must be effortless.
We don’t need new legislation that will not be enforced or is flawed because it is too specific and myopic, we need enforcement of basic and fundamental law and concepts that expand freedom and choice and our fundamental human rights.
Submit to our every tech company dictate whim or we will destroy everything you have worked for and not be able to work in your industry ever again or feed yourself is not freedom and is a crime against humanity.
And prohibition against slavery? It's both laughable and deeply offensive to consider this situation even remotely similar to chattel slavery.
It's simply not economical for many companies to deal with the long tail of false positives, so they don't. Google has billions of users, and if their algorithms are 99.999% right about bans, their metrics look great but that's still tens of thousands users wrongfully banned.
I'm not usually a fan of government intervention but this is such a no-brainer for regulation.
With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such.