Yet, while this is often the cited reason, it is simply not true.

There is no way on Earth, that scammers don't find out about such restrictions trivially, easily. So all this really does, is inconvenience the honest, and do zip, zero, nada to hassle the miscreants.

edit: more thought here, likely this is just an excuse, to not properly train reps, or to not deal with the issue at all.

It is the equiv of "think of the children!", but corp speak instead of politi speak. "Sorry for the bad service, security issue!"

A billion in topline revenue should do the trick. Once you hit that level you have to provide individualized human support. You're allowed to charge money for the support but it has to be available to anyone willing to pay at least a modest fee to communicate with a real person.

If you don't like it fuck you, you have a billion dollars get the fuck over it.

If a lonesome Pizza Hut franchise can afford to give me customer support, then so can Google, no questions asked. Yet you'll still find people white-knighting for them.

It is absurd that it is impossible to speak to a human at Google unless you have a loud enough platform. Amazon is similar too in many cases. As an Amazon seller the robot once decided that the price for an item on sale wasn’t correct. I told the robot it was in fact correct. The customer support person who I was able to reach after an incredible runaround told me through text only communication that the solution was to change the price either higher or lower. There was no way they could manually verify it. The robot had decided. In the end it took multiple guesses of adjusting the price to figure out what the Amazon robot would accept. This is beyond stupid.

No, this is your problem with monopolies. The fix is anti-trust enforcement, not slapping the word "utility" around.

Google is not going to change, they are one of the trillion dollar babies and they can just ignore us. Just like apple. What anti-trust enforcement could cause them to change? I'm skeptical the new EU rules about how "open install of apps to breakup app-store monopolies" will work to effect change.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...

Google’s monopoly isn’t “natural”. It’s temporary.

When that infrastructure rejects you or your product, you are in trouble because everything is build around the assumption that you will be reachable over Google.

Google is not a utility any more than Apple or Spotify is a utility. And if we're going to break up both of those companies, we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

Now you're getting it.

> we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

Sounds great. Let's start with Chevron.

> Sounds great.

Now you're grossly missing the point. The problem isn't the status quo, it's the system. Tearing down Standard Oil will leave a power vacuum, and adequate incentive from suppliers and processors will just make another monopoly. If your goal is to get rid of those companies, that's a pretty counterintuitive way to do it.

Personally, I think our world needs to start taking digital standards more seriously, like ISO but taken to the next level. We let ourselves get in these positions because we don't force these companies to provide interoperability or data ownership. Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale, but we need better regulation and more strict rules around proprietary interfaces. At least, that's the accelerationist mindset; we can languish in technological fiefdom for as long as we'd like, I'm sure FAANG doesn't mind.

That is my point. A system in which any of the fortune 500 companies can come into existence is grossly broken on multiple levels. Companies should be afraid of getting more than 10% of a worldwide market for fear of real anti-competition laws coming into effect rather than the farce we have now, or of vertically integrating too much, and should only make proprietary interfaces as a last resort.

A company being in a position to unilaterally change web standards, and force a monopoly on their web browser to further monopolise their advertising business should be grounds for splitting it into pieces at the very least, and seizing it in its entirety as the expected oitcome if they exercise that power.

> Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale,

The surveillance state and pending apocalypse we live in where you get jailed for successfully fighting in court says that it really can't. Any regulation or democratic control is ephemeral when you are systematically assigning more power to megacorps on a daily basis.

Partially /s. But in general, democracy isn’t doing too well, and a lot of it is due to a massive segment of bored, decadent, and petty populace that would rather watch the world burn if it owns their political enemies. At least with megacorps there is room for competence and science.

This is what the megacorps being in control looks like because they're the ones that led us here through ownership of media and thus any political candidate with a chance. Facebook, microsoft and google are only just getting started in the same space, and it is already many times worse than fox ever was.

The first time I tried using Microsoft Ads, I used a debit card in which foreign payments wasn't enabled and as soon as I clicked make payment my account was banned, No recourse through support just like how OP faced with Google. But that was in my past life, I don't want to see Ads, So I don't show Ads now.

I've been unable to close my Facebook Account, Because I couldn't take backup of my business page and there's no way to reach to them.

I totally see that. But on the flip side we see utilities like phone companies unable to block abusive robocalls and scammers.

(My thoughts are my own, and they are rarely well-formed)

Add an abuse button to the phone.

Every call costs a dollar to connect, no matter where it comes from - another carrier or international or whatever.

You get the dollar back if the receiver doesn't press the abuse button.

The dollar can be waived if the company knows the call is coming from an individual household with low call volume.

Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"

But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.

Wanted calls get a refund.

Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.

E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.

Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.

The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.

Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.

Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.

On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.

For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.

I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.

Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.

Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?

It allows callbacks from numbers you’ve called recently which is nice.

For texts there’s “Filter Unknown Senders”

Only if you let them. Life without a Google account doesn’t require meaningful sacrifice.

Perhaps Brex is miscategorized as a privacy card.

But expending even the smallest amount of effort to determine that isn't something Google feels like spending time or money on.

There is absolutely nothing that Google offers that you can’t get from somewhere else.

You're just left guessing as to what the problem may have been, not that you can do anything even if you did know. I've had the same problem with eBay.

Problem is it encourages the very behaviour they want to stop. If you're going to have an account thats central to your business, but can get shut down at any time, it just encourages burner accounts so you aren't left high and dry when the inevitable happens.

As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.

There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.

Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.

Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.

The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!

Maybe they die and get replaced but in between that happening you are still having to deal with the realities of the situation you are currently. People just want shit that works and for most of them it does most of the time. But some people get absolutely fucked and there is no good excuse for it.

People get fucked with Google accounts all the time, yes. The excuse is that Google is made of humans. As is the government. Or Apple and Microsoft for that matter. Some of these humans are better at software than others. If you think this is an easily solvable problem through laws and regulations, that regulators are going to get software design and support processes right… I think you might not have studied the history of of such laws and regulations. The good ones take decades to get right.

The benefit of not enshrining these companies as a public utility, and thus guaranteeing a mandatory mediocre experience for decades, is that it encourages the use and creation of alternatives. That dies when you legislate features.

I don’t even think the problem is that the company is made of humans. The problem is that when the black box algorithm makes a decision that locks someone out of their account or some service/feature there is no recourse. The humans are the solution to the problem, but you can’t get them to look at it unless you have a platform to stand on. It’s disgusting.

Regulations mandating a support channel of some sort is reasonable.

Also, I don't think it's reasonable to say a person needs to be free of ALL those companies. Decentralized for-profit organizations are how we get things done as a society, mostly. Pick the companies you trust/value. My point was mostly about avoiding ad-revenue-driven companies.