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Comment by jennyyang | Hacker News Reader

Just another example of how a virtual monopoly can get away with terrible, shameful and nonexistent customer support because they can. It's monopolistic behavior, but an passive form of it. Instead of actively engaging in monopolistic activity, they remove essential customer support because they have no competition. This really needs to be regulated quickly. Amazon, Google, Facebook all coomit the same behavior by hiding behind bots and algorithms with no customer support and there's nothing we can do because they are so dominant.

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Amazon and other FAANG companies have to be broken up by anti trust rules.

The existing anti trust rules are enough to push these monopolies to stop the anti competitive activities. Just like anti trust rules were used against Microsoft many years ago, which opened door to online competition like Amazon, Google, Apple etc.

I have zero faith that regulation here will realistically have any effect other than inching Amazon a bit closer to being a quasi-state service, and I also have zero faith in that improving customer service at all.

There is something we can do: regulate them.

My gas company is regulated, their customer service sucks.

I am a bit down because I’m not aware of any success in fixing this kind of problem through regulation.

I’m trying to think of a regulated industry or company that has service as good as even Walmart and can’t come up with anything.

The hope would be that at least they have some bank level of regulation where they at least have to respond by snail mail and stuff.

I should have added: regulate them to increase competition. When the long distance telephone market was deregulated in the 1990s, ending the monopoly of the Bell Operating Companies, prices crashed rapidly and service quality improved - albeit for a time.

Similarly, when you “don’t have a choice” except to work with, say, Google, there is no incentive for them to provide good service. Find a way to introduce competition and everything magically transforms.

How do you mandate good customer support?

If Amazon removes a product for wrong claims, Amazon pays the damages times N. A court, quick judgement, low or no expenses for the merchant. Apply to every jurisdiction Amazon works in.

Then Amazon would be wary of automatic bans.

Of course this must apply to every site like Amazon.

It is regulated, in the EU, by GDPR: https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

EU (and UK) citizens have the right that automated decision making that affects individuals must:

* be documented, and individuals must be informed about it.

* include simple ways to request human intervention or challenge decisions.

* be regularly checked to ensure it's working as intended.

This applies to anything with "legal or similarly significant effect on individuals". As examples, the ICO there has "automatic refusal of an online credit application" and "e-recruiting practices without human intervention".

IANAL, but I imagine this would cover the OP's situation if they were EU-based, and most similar complaints (Apple unilaterally pulled my app down incorrectly and won't answer my emails, Google wrongly closed my Gmail account). If a lawsuits & penalties start appearing under that umbrella, it might help change the monopolies positions.

Doesn't help in the US of course, but hopefully they'll follow suit in the coming years, which would apply quite a bit more pressure here.

How are they a monopoly in this sphere? Shopify is growing enormously quickly and competing for the same merchants amazon services.

https://stratechery.com/2020/the-anti-amazon-alliance/

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