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Comment by ajb | Hacker News Reader

One of the simplest functions of a justice system - before impartial judgement, before detailed laws, before qualified advocates - is simply the right to summon a powerful person to justify their actions. Increasingly it seems that we will need this to be applied here, ideally in some simpler and less costly way than a full trial. It is just wrong for companies to make money by inviting people to rely on them , and then ghosting if something goes wrong.

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IMO there needs to be some kind of minimum allowed customer support when handling user data. If you can't provide real support for free, then remove the free plan. If everyone has to then they are all equal again.

It's just wrong to trick people in to trusting a service with their data and then yanking it with no support contact.

Having recently dealt with what I’m assuming are a meatbag support team from Microsoft (specifically their business partnership program), I can honestly say there’s not much difference between a bunch of useless meatbags and no support whatsoever.

It took me 4 weeks to sign up for a service which requires few business details and proof of a domain by form of an invoice.

For a reason I don’t understand, it has no bearing on the rest of the registration process whatsoever, I just gave them proof of some unrelated random domain I own.

That's easy to fix. You have a government body that takes complaints and if a company receives too many complaints over their customer service, they must pay a penalty.

That’s basically the US banking system, and it’s notoriously consumer un-friendly.

On the contrary, the CFPB has rave reviews from what I have read:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/

I had a problem where my spouse’s employer’s Health Savings Account custodian (PNC bank in this case) was simply giving us the run around on charging a fee that was not on their fee schedule, which the employees of PNC even acknowledged was an error, but no one could get in touch with a person with enough power to fix the problem.

I submitted a request on the CFPB website asking them to look into it and within 48 hours I had a boss call me from PNC bank to confirm that my error was resolved and provided me her email address and phone number if there were further issues.

Trump did neuter the CPFB though, but hopefully Biden will bring it back:

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-01-11/column-cfp...

And if people file these complains for doing stuff like actually hosting terrorism? For this to work you'd also need a review board to determine if TOS clauses are "fair" and not overbearing.

If a literal terrorist files a complaint then the police department can pick them up. The complaints department only needs to handle local citizen complaints.

However you feel about a company and their support policies, don't call other people "meatbags". That's gross. You're no higher tier of person than they are.

It is not insulting, its science fiction[0][1]. Many humans self identify as such[2].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=meatbag&tbm=bks

[1] https://starwars.fandom.com/wiki/Meatbag

[2] https://twitter.com/amyhoy

I was differentiating between humans and bots. Claiming we’re some higher form of being than an animal is equally dehumanising to the animals.

> dehumanising to the animals

Honestly not sure if you're joking about this.

Most animals are dehuman after all.

> IMO there needs to be some kind of minimum allowed customer support when handling user data.

At least partially covered by GDPR for Europeans.

I think that's the wrong answer to a real problem. Instead of trying to prop up an equally-powerful entity to address power abuses of another powerful entity, why not decentralize power in the first place?

Why should there be megacorporations or nation-states to begin with? They seem to be causing more problems (massive inequality, environmental destruction) than they are solving.

I agree. But I'm not sure what the solution is. A lot of people will say "Hey, it's a private company", and as a libertarian minded person I tend to agree. But increasingly these private companies have more power of my life than my own government does, and it's accelerating further it seems.

The solution is government regulation. It should not be legal for Google to host peoples important data and yank it without any way for the person to get their data back.'

Google should be legally required to either provide a phone number to call, or make the Takeout feature always available regardless of account bans.

This is only true since the governments are ran by congress people that openly trade stocks based on insider info and take 'campaign gifts' from the companies.

This isn't new, by the way. Companies have had their way since the advent of the telephone, it was just in the shadows since the internet wasn't around and we didn't have companies attaching their brand name to every consumer-unfriendly act committed.

They only gain as much power as you allow them to have. You can still use your own domain. You can still back up to external drives in your house. You can still leave encrypted copies of those drives at a friend's house.

You can still only get one or two, if you're lucky, high speed Internet service providers.

Right, in my apartment building I don't have a choice. It's all through Comcast.

As a person residing in France, that's alien to me. We've had government regulations for ISP choice for almost two decades now. I'm very critical of them because they're actually not enforced (still very hard/impossible for smaller non-profit ISPs to use big corp fiber despite the law saying so), but at least they enable me to choose whatever xDSL provider i'd like, or even start my own for somewhat-reasonable prices.

I feel bad for you. Comcast recently accidentally disconnected my service twice now 2 weeks before my move because their internal systems are screwed up and then told me they couldn't fix their own issues because of their system, thus leaving me without Internet for multiple days.

This is where libertarianism ends up abutting to anarchism (or left libertarianism if you prefer); the recognition that governments are not the only power structure capable of trampling the individual.

Fun fact! The word “libertarian” was self consciously co-opted by the libertarian right in the 1960s by Murray Rothbard, who viewed that co-option as an important part of his war with the left.

As a libertarian, you would surely agree that leveling the playing field (with regulations and technical solutions) is a good thing. What do you think about hosting coops such as those listed on libreho.st or chatons.org federations?

Your capitalist reflex might be to dismiss self-organized, user-oriented coops... but they seem to provide better service and support than most commercial services i've dealt with.

If these private companies have such power, it's because you handed it to them.

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