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Comment by zxcvbn4038 | Hacker News Reader

I think this has been a long time coming and probably needs to happen. My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service. When your a monopoly you don’t really care about consumers because you don’t have to. Look at your local DMV, your local cable company, and Google. What do they have in common? They act in their own self interest over consumer’s interests. They take anti-consumer actions with impunity and are dismissive of all complaints. They go through great lengths to turn their problems into your problems.

I’m hoping that this leads to adblock being fully supported in chrome again with all the proper hooks to be able to filter content. I also hope this leads to greater privacy and a right to be forgotten for all. Most of all I hope this leads to Google answering the phone instead of hiding behind their algorithms. (Even when I was working at a top 5 web site the only way we could contact anyone at Google was Twitter and former college roommates that happened to work there).

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> Look at your local DMV.

This is IMO the only part of your response I disagree with.

In most of the OECD, DMVs are wonderful, or at least, functional and expedient. In most developed countries, government work is considered a public service job, and respected, appreciated and well paid. 30% of Norway, Sweden, Denmark and 25% of Finland is employed by the government.

The DMV being the most utterly soul sucking place on earth has little to do with being a monopoly, but rather, Americans belief that the government is worthless, manifest. People - and services - tend to behave the way you expect them to, and this is no exception. While not a uniquely American phenomenon, it's not a function of being a monopoly.

As you'll see virtually all Ontario DMV equivalents (ServiceOntario, broader in scope than the DMV, handling health card issuance, birth certificates, and a many other government services [2]) have wait times under 20 minutes [1]. They also do manage complaints quite effectively via the Ombudsman program [3], and as a last resort, fold neatly under media pressure.

[1] https://data.ontario.ca/dataset/serviceontario-wait-times-in...

[2] https://www.ontario.ca/page/serviceontario

[3] https://www.ombudsman.on.ca/contact-us

Funnily enough, the DMV is quite nice in some parts of the US.

This matches my experience as well.

I suspect a big factor is that most civil-service jobs don't allow a person to be penalized or rewarded based on their general level of friendliness when dealing with the public / customers / constituents.

Some people in those positions are friendly despite the lack of extrinsic motivation, but not everyone is wired / conditioned to be like that.

I was shocked how efficient the DMV was in Seattle after coming from Houston. It was actually a pleasant experience.

My experience with American DMVs is that your experience varies depending on location. The DMVs in densely populated low socioeconomic areas are overcrowded and take hours of waiting and have hostile representatives. Opposite of DMVs in less dense high economic areas. The former have to deal with much more difficult customers, and 5x the number of them.

I remember when I flew in to buy a car in Elyria, OH and got my temporary tag from the DMV in and out in 10 minutes and was on my way.

Even in suburban SC the DMV there was very painless.

I wish I could agree, but after waiting in line for an hour just to be rudely dismissed in 5 seconds for not having the "right form", I feel like OP's perspective is pretty accurate. At least here - WA State, USA.

I literally got a, "This isn't the right form. Next" type response...

Unfortunately, glaring angrily in annoyance at the staff and not saying a word until they extended even an ounce of courtesy by getting the right form for me, was the only way to get through the bureaucratic BS in this situation.

A lot of DMV workers, for reasons beyond me, have a sort of "Oh, you forgot to dot one 'i' on this 300 page form. Go back to the drawing board, get in line again, and see me when you are done" type of attitude. Sure, they don't have the time to walk every single person through filling out forms, but a lot of times this lack of enthusiasm to help at all is pushed to an extreme.

The DMV here has a very strong "You need US more than we need you" attitude to it.

It's one of the reasons I've spent more time driving on expired licenses or with expired car registration than I would care to admit. "Oh, $50 fine? Eh.. Beats waiting in line for the DMV and hating my life for a couple days afterwards."

The Renton, WA DMV is lovely, albeit small. The Kent one is larger, but it's in Kent.

I think everyone here agrees that American DMVs are awful. The point was that it's not necessary that government (or monopoly) services end up that way. As someone that has experienced California DMVs and the equivalent in Ontario, I can confirm the quality in Canada is much higher.

I think everyone here agrees that American DMVs are awful.

I don't, see my sibling reply. I'm perfect content with the WA state DMV and the service I receive. I'm a little peeved that they recently tack on 3% if you use a credit card, but I can understand why.

Indiana and North Carolina, OTOH, only contribute to the poor reputation of DMVs in the U. S. and can go suck a bag of dicks.

I feel like that proves the point of this comment thread, that DMVs don't need to be awful.

I also don't. I've never had a problem with service or wait times in one. Portland and Seattle, both have been fast, comfortable, and helpful.

I have far more positive anecdotes here in WA State, USA. The last time I renewed my driver's license, it literally took me longer to walk the mile round trip from my office than the time I spent inside the DoL (Department of Licensing here in WA State, USA). We don't buy cars very often, but the last time we transferred title was annoying because we had to wait behind one or two others, but it was the usual print-print-stamp-stamp-have-a-nice-day ten minutes once at the desk.

OTOH, it probably depends greatly on the office one goes to.

Same here, WA DoL is quite pleasant, especially with the online appointment system.

The office makes a big difference. I've learned that if you don't get the service you want right away leave - there are other offices that might be better. Though it depends, in my city there is only one that is a reasonable distance away and they are middle of the road. I've tried to use some that are slow and hate you, but not far away was a nice one that was very fast and helpful. After a while locals learn where not to go.

I would not be surprised if DMV employees were measured and rewarded on their throughput, so punting people who have anything wrong is incentivized.

Or it's because they're underfunded and have tons of people to get through. You had an hour to ensure you had the right form and filled it out properly. If they get lax about things like that, people will be less careful and it will just waste more of everyone's time.

Whether the job is respected/well paid, or whether the wait times are long, is orthogonal to whether they’re a painful experience.

Every comment I’ve heard about European government offices is that, yes, they’re functional, but you have to be very organized, great at following directions, and super deferential, or they’ll send you down a bureaucratic hellhole.

As I understand it from the UK, a 'DMV' is the equivalent of the DVLA, handling 'licence plates' and driver licensing? (And then 'your local' because states.)

So, what do you even need to do so frequently that you care how wonderful/expedient/slow/in/efficient your local DMV is? (Nevermind it being a 'soul-sucking place', that you actually go to?!)

It sounds to me like ours is better/faster simply by doing less, some red tape that we either don't have or have automated.

My first and last interaction with the DVLA was when I passed my test. ..ok maybe I filled out a web form for change of address since.

I need to get my every 4 years license picture during lunch break (In theory this is flexible, but meetings often give me just an hour), which includes eating and travel there and back.

I also prefer to transfer titles for private sales directly at the DMV as this way I know everything was done correctly.

None of this happens often, maybe every other year. Still enough that I notice how bad some are. Of course my first job I often ate lunch next door to a very helpful, fast, and friendly DMV office and that started some habits...

If you've ever been to a DMV in Ontario, it's not good. They're horrible in my experience. Interesting to see the data suggests otherwise but just google Ontario dmv experience, everyone here hates them.

The only way to use the DMV is to make an appointment online. If you aren't doing that you will have a bad time.

That seems like a skewed test that is biased companies that work at scale. It's much harder to have good customer service for every user when you're making pennies per user but bank on having billions of users.

It's also much easier to do hard things when you're making billions of dollars.

I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.

It doesn't matter how much money they make, what matters is how much they're making per user, and how much it would cost per user to provide them to full customer support. You can get decent Google customer support if you pay 1$/month and get Google One (one top of extra storage space).

https://one.google.com/about/support

No, at a basic level how much they make per user is not the user's problem. That's Google's chosen business model.

You cannot sell a defective thing then when the customer comes back say "sorry, we actually only made $0.01 on that so we don't provide customer service, goodbye."

Your obligation to not, for instance, arbitrarily revoke someone's account access causing them measurable harm is not dependent on whether you deem yourself to have a sufficient level of profit on the transaction.

Companies have obligations that external and not bounded entirely by their commercial whims.

That's the reality for companies with high volume and low margins. The number of customer service representatives per user they can hire is proportional to their profits per user. You can't change that with legislation. A company making 1/10th the profit per user cannot spend as much on customer service. At best, you can make laws that effectively ban companies from having low margins.

If I buy something from my local dollar store, they have a no return policy. The items are typically low quality. But they cost a dollar.

My cell company, on the other hand, charges around $60/month for a phone plan, so they have more customer service representatives.

In almost every developed country in the world except the United States, it would be illegal to sell a defective item then refuse to refund or replace it, whether it's $1 or $10,000. Consumer protection regimes are a real thing that exist, although maybe not in your jurisdiction.

So yes, you can legislate that. By making merchants bear the cost of defects and take a loss on replacing the product, you make it no longer a viable business model to constantly sell broken stuff. It's a proper alignment of incentives.

In a world where Google is being sued for antitrust in part because of a monopoly they built by giving stuff away for free, perhaps making it harder to have a "low margins, but we aren't accountable for anything" business is not a bad thing.

You're also building a strawman - that Google would need to spend a lot per user on customer service to start actually providing customer service instead of refusing to do so for most of its products.

It would need to spend a lot in absolute dollars, sure, but the vast majority of users would have precisely zero support interactions. No one is saying that Google should have an army of 500,000 support reps. Just that it should actually be possible to contact Google without knowing someone who works there.

To expand on the dollar store example, they will take back an item that was sold outright broken or defective (although I've never seen anyone actually return in item to the dollar store). They don't have to take back all their low quality products when they perform poorly or break, nor do they offer customer support.

I think you're building a strawman here. This is a thread about Google having poor customer service, and you're trying to frame it as if Google is refusing to refund defective products. Those are not the same. Google refunds or replaces defective products they sell.

Google has some customer support. It's not very good. Google has several billion users and only about 100k employees total. That's somewhere around 1 employee per 30k users.

Customer support quality is a continuum, not a binary thing. The comment you replied to was pointing out that a company that makes a small amount per user cannot afford the same level of customer service as a company that makes a lot per user.

No one in the thread said Google couldn't hire more customer support. They said looking at customer support quality as an "ad-hoc monopoly test" is biased against companies with huge user bases and small margins per user.

> You cannot sell a defective thing

That's the flaw in your argument, they didn't sell anything... You are using a free product, which you are not obligated to use and didn't pay for.

Amazon has pretty good customer service, IMHO. I've even had good experiences w/ AT&T of all companies (though presumably that's because there's virtually no barrier for switching providers in SF)

You get excellent support as a Prime member paying $10+ a month, or you've just spend hundreds shopping there. You're not a free ad-based user like with Google.

I'm not sure how much these numbers hold up, but a quick search claims that they get around 150-250M monthly users. That's still a whole order of magnitude away from 1-2B Google gets.

Honestly, I got good support even for things that logically would not yield profits (in my case, I erroneously bought a music book for the wrong instrument, called in to explain my mistake, and they subsequently shipped the right one for free, without even asking me to return the other one). I don't have prime and I'm not one of those people that always shops amazon.

I read recently that a lot of amazon returns just end up in the dumpster. It feels like they consider the logistics of returns in their customer retention strategy.

> but bank on having billions of users

At the point where you have billions of users, you may just be a...

Silicon Valley might be resistant to admit operating at scale is just bad for people. At a certain scale a lot of societal harms manage to fall through the cracks.

So what's the solution? Limit who can use Youtube? Charge for usage of Youtubes? So only those who can afford it are able to get tutorials on how to fix their sink and tie a tie but poor people can keep getting poorer?

>So only those who can afford it are able to get tutorials on how to fix their sink and tie a tie but poor people can keep getting poorer?

does the same logic also apply to the tools you use to fix the sink? I really have to laugh about this borderline gaslighting attempt that Google and Facebook have come up with to justify their ad monopolies. As if having to pay for information is any more objectionable than having to pay for anything else. The only reason they've concocted this terrible argument is because free stuff is how they get their fangs into everyone.

It was just an example, the point is that these services have democratized access to information and have greatly helped bring up less wealthy people. Ad-based model has it's fair share of problems, but being able to give everyone, even the poor who wouldn't able to afford it, access to information that can help them improve their lives, is easily the best argument for that model.

No, I think success in large platforms has depended on being able to automate away human problems, ignoring the harm that causes. We need to mandate human moderation and customer service, as well as a robust and transparent appeal process. And we need to strip Section 230 immunity so platforms have real liability behind their content decisions.

Platforms above a certain scale will either require enough manpower to handle them appropriately, or will break down at a certain size and lead to a wider market.

Double Click / Google Ads doesn't have billions of users. It is unbelievable how much money people spend on Ads and still get really bad customer service. I hear things are (somehow) even worse with FB Ads customer service.

My ad-hoc monopoly test has always been customer service.

And who exactly is Google’s customer? The Gmail user, or the ad buyer?

I've heard a bunch of horror stories from ad buyers over the years, FWIW.

Fair. And you’d think Google would care more there, as there’s a direct paying relationship.

The gmail user is a customer. They may not be paying directly, but they are still a customer.

If you aren't paying directly then aren't you the product? You may be a consumer of a service but the customers are primarily other businesses who are trying to get your attention so you'll buy something they think you might really enjoy like the coffee maker you just bought from Amazon a hour ago.

Pithy saying aside, if you use a free service, you're still a customer.

No, that's just an HN iamverysmartism.

A product is a something produced. Google provides services to users in exchange for their attention to ads. It's a barter of value.

"If the product is free, then you are the product"

Downvoted for this comment? I swear this place is worse than reddit.

The now-trite "if you're not the customer, you're the product" distinction just isn't helpful anymore.

Youtube is a great example where creators, subscribers (both Premium and ad-watching) and advertisers are all Google's customers. Google profits by providing a platform for all those parties to come together and engage in commerce.

And yet none of those parties are really buying anything directly from Google -- even for ads Google is just facilitating the placement of ads on creators' content. Premium subscribers are paying creators with Google divvying up the payment and taking its cut.

> Youtube is a great example where creators, subscribers (both Premium and ad-watching) and advertisers are all Google's customers. Google profits by providing a platform for all those parties to come together and engage in commerce.

That makes them users, not customers. As you note, none of them are paying Google. A user who does not pay for the service is not a customer, because they don't have the most important capability that a customer has: taking your money elsewhere if you are not satisfied. That means Google itself does not know how much its services are worth to their users, because it has prevented those users from telling it what the services are worth by paying for them. And that is why Google is notorious for killing services that are valuable to users but don't generate enough ad revenue.

Airlines have pretty bad customer service. so do most insurance companies.

As do many companies even small. Hell, lots of restaurants have poor customer service, let alone grocery stores, big box stores, etc. That’s hardly a unique characteristic to monopolies.

Have you ever tried to cancel a gym membership? It’s a stretch to imagine any gym has a monopoly, and yet…

Don't you just cancel payment on your credit card and be done with it?

No, business can continually put charges on it. You'd need to resort to chargebacks or litigation to stop it.

Bingo.

In the past (and this was a while ago), you had to pay a cancellation surcharge, even if you were month to month, unless you found someone to take over your plan.

Airlines are actually heavily monopolized. However, it's the routes that are monopolized.

So you appear have your choice of airlines, but if you want a direct flight and don't live in a hub, then you don't really.

And, often when it seems like you have a choice, you're actually flown by people from a no-name contract airline that controls that route no matter which brand is on the plane.

If airlines are heavily monopolized it's never shown on their statement of financial position, like, ever.

Inefficiency is often subsidized by the government due to lobbying under the guise of public convenience.

A monopoly is not necessarily profitable. I have a monopoly on the distribution of my blog content, but that does not make any difference in my annual income.

Assuming that the parent's assertion that airlines have a monopoly on the route from airport X to aiport Y is correct, it does not give them any pricing power in general because they do not have a monopoly on all routes from X to Y. There are multiple airlines providing routes from X to Y, hence price competition.

Then all he is really saying is that two airplanes cannot occupy the same space at the same time. Everyone knows this. Infants know this. It's simple physics.

When people talk about monopoly, they mean the absence of competition. They're talking about one firm having the control over the distribution of some kind of commodity, for instance, Standard Oil. But as you say, airlines have plenty of competition.

Ehh... Plenty of airlines have great customer service.

There's tons of tiny companies with terrible customer service. Maybe "monopoly" implies "bad customer service", but the other direction certainly doesn't hold. It sounds like you're suggesting the implication works the other way round.

My DMV in Arapaho County Colorado is efficient and easy. Most things can be done online or at a kiosk. If you do need to talk to a person the wait is short.

In the rare instances where I have a problem with comcast they have been able to solve it pretty quickly and easily. They are over priced though.

We use a lot of google services and I've almost never needed any kind of customer support because they tend to just work. I did have some issues with a Fi line once and chat responded immediately.

There are major problems with monopolies, but from my experience customer service tends to be fantastic compared to smaller organizations.

Can't we have some minimum requirements for customer service which companies have to comply with?

Quality of customer service and percent of market share are inversely correlated, but they're still separate variables, and one does not imply the other.

Amazon is an example of a company that, despite having an enormous market share of online shopping, has remained aggressively aligned with the customer. (They'll happily use their market dominance to wring every last penny out of their suppliers and their employees, though.)

Simplifying greatly, this is the main difference between antitrust laws in the EU and the US: the EU doesn't really have the concept of a benevolent monopoly. In the US, you have to make a strong case that the company is engaging in anticompetitive practices.

Notably, this has less to do with how the alleged monopoly treats its own customers than with how it treats other companies in the same space.

This argument doesn't seem correct to me. It's not like Google has had great customer support when they started out and later on, as they became a monopoly, they stopped doing that so it's one of the (many) signals it's a monopoly that doesn't care. Google never had customer support, it's whole business was built around that model. They are successful BECAUSE of it, not IN SPITE of, and only the latter form can be a signal of monopoly.

If you want a more accurate signal here go for "Google doesn't care about its users as much as it did many years ago" in terms of anti-user features and changes it's making all the time now. But of course that's a bit harder to show as happening because you have to take each such change on a case by case basis and show that indeed it's hurting more users than it's helping (because many such changes while they seem as they go against the prosumer or the HN community, they very much follow what the average Joe needs or wants).

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