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Comment by utopian3 | Hacker News Reader

Google’s typical approach is more like, “shoot first, ask no questions, and provide no contact method”.

People would have a lot fewer issues with Google if it actually had support contact that functioned. It is awful that they just kill a thing without even contacting the author but it is made so much worse by the utter lack of willingness as a company to even accept the possibility they made an error.

These sorts of problems are the reason I stopped doing Android and OS X apps, being that beholden to companies who have shown time and again to do not just wrongfully takedown apps but also act anticompetitively in their marketplaces, it is just asking for trouble. Stick to games and website apps and avoid genuinely innovative takes on anything that Google (and Apple) has any remote interest in or your business might just disappear overnight and you won't have the funds to stop them.

This sort of protection is just messed up but I can't see the USA taking action against this giant of a company any time soon. You still see people complaining about EU fines for anti-competitive behaviour regularly here on HN and yet they are a drop in the bucket. The web isn't free anymore and those that want their data to be their own went underground into the self-hosting community.

> People would have a lot fewer issues with Google if it actually had support contact that functioned.

Fun fact:

According to German law a company is required to provide (real) support under its support contact address.

Google ignored this law for years.

A few years ago they got sued over this. Now there is a legally binding court ruling demanding from Google that they comply with the law in force.[1]

Fast-froward 5 years, and guess what. Google continues to ignore the law, and since than additionally the court ruling.

[1] https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Google-muss-unter-Su... (It's in German, but the translation I've tested on https://www.deepl.com/translator is quite perfect)

Specifically, this is a result of the imprint laws in germany, which require you put up contact data. An E-Mail Address is optional but if you put it up, you need to respond to incoming requests (mostly of legal nature). The automated response wasn't considered by the court to be sufficient.

Google ignores it because they can afford to.

Consider the scale at which they operate... How could they possibly turn a profit given the number of people who use their free and paid services, and the number of people who are pissed off at their business practices? I know I want to call and harangue them at least once a month... Imagine if every single Gmail user could do that. They would crumple over their own tech support costs in just a few years.

They could afford it. It would be expensive but they are so hugely profitable that the cost of a large customer support team would be a small drop in the bucket of incoming cash.

They figured out that ad agencies are not really accountable to anyone. So that's what they pretend to be.

Yeah, well, you nailed it, unfortunately.

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