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Comment by criddell | Hacker News Reader

I understand that Google wants to handle as much as possible with a support.py script, but they really should start having people to contact.

Maybe there should be a fee for a support request and if the Google rep finds that Google's automated system messed up they report the problem internally and refund the fee to the app developer.

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If there's going to be a fee it should come out of Google's $100+ billion in savings that they are accruing in part by evading expenses like customer support. This person, and all Play store developers, are customers that paid Google to publish on their app store. They shouldn't have to additionally pay Google to provide the same support that is standard everywhere else even at scale, such as AT&T, Comcast, Amazon etc.

In the case of Google, neither developers nor end-users are customers. Their true customers are buyers of space to display ads, and buyers of data from user tracking.

While that was true twenty years ago, it was more like ads were the only service they had and buying their [only] service made a customer. Purchasing their goods and services is still what makes you their customer in most countries where the term is defined by commerce departments or similar, and now Google offers much more than just ads.

I pay Google each month for Google Music, phone service, and for hosting. I'd say I'm a customer of theirs.

Any processing fee should only go to a third party, otherwise you'll have a hard time avoiding bad incentives. Even for something like youtube, were you already have three parties, any arbitrator should be mostly independent from google, since they have a lot of control about what conflicts emerge in the first place (think content ID, punishments for false DMCAs, etc).

But i really cannot understand why something like this doesn't already exist. Imagine how many false DMCA conflicts could be avoided if both parties had to place a $5 deposit to get a human ruling. And the $5 of the losing party should easily be enough to compensate the arbitrators work for most conflicts. Building such a mechanical turk like small claims online arbitration service seems easy and no matter how hard I try, I cannot come up with any reason youtube wouldn't want to use such a service. So why does it not exist already?

I'm not confident a fee structure that incentivizes Google to not be wrong will work that well.

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