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Comment by komali2 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I feel for that company. I was always skeptical of people raising alarm bells at everything "going chrome," but now I'm starting to get it - Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it.

Sure, that company developed a business around Google. But it still feels bad.

The only problem is that I don't trust a large portion of American politicians that are seeking regulation - they seem highly motivated to force Google to become a Chinese-style propagandic censorship machine (i.e. Republicans complaining about "bias" because the president's picture shows up if you Google image search for "moron.") So while articles like this make me feel bad, I feel trapped into a need to fervently defend Google and "tech companies" to avoid my concerns being coopted.

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> Google has the ability to just nuke a company from orbit on a whim, and I'm not sure anybody can do anything about it.

And that's why you don't build that critical point of failure into your product, even if it's harder and more expensive to do it another way. Which, sadly, means don't build your company around an Android app.

They can do this to your personal Google account, too. What are the repercussions, to most people, of being summarily banned from all Google products? (Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services? What's your personal contact email for work, taxation, etc.? Do you have a local backup of your Gmail archive?) It's unlikely, sure, but if it does happen then it's gonna suck.

For me it's (just) a way to log in into YouTube, I have a coupple of lists there which are nice, and I also use it for the Play Store on my phone where I bought 2 apps which I use, so I guess those would be gone too.

Otherwise I don't think I use a google account for anything else.

> Hint: What's the recovery email address for all of your random online services?

hey_$service_dont_spam_me@my_domain.com

> What's your personal contact email for work, taxation

my_name@my_domain.com

I always thought of gmail like gmx.net or something, it's where people who don't know internet things could get free email. I figured it's a good way to test the waters, I also had free email long before I had a domain... but over a decade later, we're actually building houses out of this duct tape? It's duct tape, it's useful, but it's still duct tape.

I don't mean this to blame the author. (Though them making another account with Google for private stuff made me despair)

My first thought was, if companies want to be persons, and do this to other persons, a fair response would actually be "Dear Google, stop existing. Please don't make another company, either." I know it's not realistic, not even desirable to me -- we don't even boycott really horrible actors on a large scale, so why ruin Google and all the lives that hang off of that. I don't believe in collective punishment under any circumstances, ever. But as a response to Google (et al.) "as a company", it would be fair -- and no need to tell them why, either.

I'd like to do this, but I'm hesitant to give up the convenience of things like Google spam filters or the tools Google software like Inbox or Calendar give me, specifically when they're tied to my email.

Who is proposing a propagandic censorship machine? The example, as stupid as it was, was intended to highlight bias and ask the question of how big tech can be trusted to act without ideological or personal preference when it comes to censoring speech, deciding what apps are permissible, who can earn on their platforms etc. I don’t hear anyone who is championing regulation suggesting that the solution to censorship on the likes of google is more censorship only this time enforced by the government

Nobody explicitly, obviously. However, the head of the Republican party has expressed frustration multiple times that the press is "allowed to say whatever it wants." This sentiment has carried over into the "drag tech companies in front of the Senate" debacle, and my read of the questions being asked of, for example, Zuckerberg, were that they were being asked to try to demonstrate that not only do internet companies "have bias," but that they should be regulated, perhaps made to be more "fair" to the Republican party. I believe such regulation could easily transform or be compared to my Google searches being blocked in China because they "violate the political harmony of the people's republic."

You may fairly say that I am engaging in slippery slope, but I take freedom of speech and thought very seriously, and so any attacks on it to any degree are terribly inflated in my mind.

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