On a side note: GDPR demands that companies provide a way to get a manual review for decisions made by machines.
Correct. Unfortunately, from what I've heard so far, all that this entails is that some drone looks over the case, and checks a "reviewed" box or so. It's a right to manual review, not to manual rectification.
Rather than "Evan at" I'd say "especially at". It costs big companies way more money to deal with legal issues than it costs you to raise them.
You only have so many staff lawyers and it doesn't take a lot to get them bogged down. The bigger you are, the now likely you are too have a bunch of legal work.
It's simply in their best interest to make your legal case go away as quickly as possible in most cases.
Courts (at least in Germany) cannot just arbitrarily decide on what is just or not; they must follow the rule of law. Without some adequate legal basis, a court won't order a thing.
> It is not for others to convince you that you should consider human rights more important than corporate rights.
Human rights are by definition more important than corporate rights. I take offense at your suggestion that I'd consider the latter more important, given that I explicitly stated that I'm 100% on the GP's side.
Once you have monopoly or near-monopoly, you become more like infrastructure, whether you provide electricity or access to customers.
At that point, you either have to expect to be willing to host anyone who stays within the law, or have the monopoly broken up.
Only the most hardcore market fundamentalists/objectivits tend to disagree about this principle, in my experience. (Which means practically nobody outside the US). Though some seem to be quite willing to accept abuse of market power if it primarily hurts their political enemies.
> Only the most hardcore market fundamentalists/objectivits tend to disagree about this principle, in my experience.
Even if the court agrees in principle, it still needs a adequate legal basis to issue an order. Violation of a law, or a contract, or whatever. I asked the GP, who seems to have experience with such cases, what this legal basis this could be.
The legal basis to intervene is there, but may be vague and open to interpretation.
For instance, a near-monopoly position might cause other regulations, like laws against unfair business practices to be interpreted more strictly than for other intermediaries:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...
As long as the population within a jurisdiciton univerally supports the principles behind a ruling, finding some regulation to support it usually can be done.
In the US, there seems to be two factors that make it a lot harder to enforce such regulation (to the extent that they even exist there) - The fact that these companies are American and able to buy influence through lobbying and contributions - The current division in American politics, where virtually any position supported by one side automatically will be opposed by the other, causing paralysis
The key thing is, going via the court system or even "just" the legal department without involving the courts short-circuits the relatively powerless first-level support.
If you're interested in the finer details and a bit of ranting, read e.g. this post from lawyer Christian Saefken [1] - it's geared towards Twitter (and Facebook, which a friend of mine had success with just the same).
Contracts work both ways: now imagine Google, or Facebook, or Twitter stating that you can't close your account without a good reason because you have a contract.
The point is that you don't need a good reason, you just need a previously agreed upon reason.
A cursory examination of the ToS [2] is shows numerous cases in which Google (or the user) can terminate the contract. Whatever happened here, it's all but certain that Google claims that one of these cases is fulfilled, hence they have the right to terminate the contract.
> If you're interested in the finer details and a bit of ranting, read e.g. this post from lawyer Christian Saefken [1] - it's geared towards Twitter (and Facebook, which a friend of mine had success with just the same).
> [1] https://christian-saefken.de/abmahnen-aber-richtig/
That lawyer is claiming a Right to Free Speech. I don't how this strategy can be successful, as Twitter will counter-claim that they it's a private platform they are free to regulate. Sexualized content can be free speech but surely one wouldn't claim that Twitter has the obligation to host it if they don't want to.
If Twitter indeed caved, then they caved simply because they assessed that said Tweet wasn't worth the trouble, not because they were legally obliged to.
And the privacy argument is often effectively countered with security concerns, even more so if that is expressly stated so in the ToS.
Just to be clear: I'm 100% on the GP's side, I'm just curious what the Verfügung could do here. In order for the court issue such an order, it needs at least a reasonable legal basis.