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Comment by ridaj | Hacker News Reader

> There’s no regulation for what happens when Google or Facebook or whatever deletes or blocks an account and provides no support.

Yes there is, per the trade regulations you're entitled to a refund

Wait

I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you pay for anything over 100 Mb? Then held your email address hostage if you wanted to switch providers? Hell no. But I also don't think government should force anyone to provide services to me for free.

Edit: downvotes without replies do not help me understand where this feeling of entitlement to a free service comes from; insight would be appreciated.

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I pay for their services with money every month and year. Their customer service sucks. I’m worried about getting hosed by them one day.

There are numerous stories of paying customers losing their account and getting no help.

I didn’t downvote you, but your response seems disengenuous. Even if the service was free, people depend on them substantially and losing that access disrupts businesses and lives.

Google is a monopoly for search. Losing the ability to buy ads or broadcast on YouTube without any due process is a big deal and needs regulation. I’m not a fan of regulation and thinks there are many inefficiencies. But Google has had 20 years without regulation and obviously won’t change because it’s profitable the way they have it now.

> I'm only partly sarcastic. If you think you're entitled to anything provided as a free service then the problem starts there. Do I miss the days when ISPs provided email as part of your subscription? Then made you pay for anything over 100 Mb? Then held your email address hostage if you wanted to switch providers? Hell no. But I also don't think government should force anyone to provide services to me for free.

I'm gonna argue that government shouldn't force anyone to provide services for free, but they should mandate that if you provide a service, you also take responsibility for the customer's property in context of that service, whether that service is free or not.

If I take my car to be serviced and they accept it, they can't just tow it to a junkyard and tell me to bugger off when I come back for it. Why can Google effectively put my private correspondence through the shredder and tell me to bugger off?

Likewise, offering to hold your grocery bag for a minute for free while you go to the restroom doesn't entitle me to destroy everything in the bag and throw it away.

Well one could argue Google and FB services are not free. Those 2 companies are 2 of the most profitable, valuable companies in the world. If they are providing their services for free, how can that be? Our attention and information is what they profit from, and that should not be undervalued. They are certainly not providing these services to us out of the goodness of their hearts.

I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment but I don't think this will hold up in case of account deletions or bans.

Let say your 'attention', using the service, is used to pay for 'goods', account/ access to service.

How is the revenue derived fron 'attention'? By the attention being spent on preselected content, e.g. ads, that are choosen by the platform. One could argue that revoking access to a service from the platform side is okay since the attention is not being 'spent' after the removal or ban.

It might be feasible to expect that services, like an email account, are not taken away abitrarly but 'just because it's profitable' is not a sound argument. Making yourself dependent on a platform is not the problem of the platform.

Those services are the payment to you. You are selling your attention to google and Facebook for email/social network access and they then time slice that attention and sell it to advertisers.

If you use Google’s free email, you are not their customer. If you have an AdWords account, you are.

If you don’t like the deal, start charging them money or stop giving your attention to them for what you get in return. It’s that simple.

> Well one could argue Google and FB services are not free.

I don't possibly see how. The services cost no money, thus they are unequivocally free. Perhaps one could reasonably argue that just because something is free doesn't mean the user isn't entitled to any rights, but torturing the definition of free to suit your argument strikes me as obviously fallacious.

> If they are providing their services for free, how can that be

Because advertisers pay them. This logic is like saying FM radio isn't free because it has ads, this is just not true.

You pay with your data and your privacy.

These companies are providing critical infrastructure. If I run a business that's dependent on the phone lines and they cut me off, I'm entitled to a hell of a lot more than the monthly fee for my line. There's many businesses that are solely reliant on Facebook to earn a living. Should Facebook own them?

Paying for their services doesn't seem to make the customer service any better.

The service isn't free, you pay for it with your personal information. If they want to provide refunds by deleting our information, that seems like a fair trade.

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