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.
I find the argument that Google et al cannot -afford- to do anything but treat their users in an arbitrary, high-hanged way unconvincing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At the point where you have billions of users, you may just be a...