Speaking of suing, why has nobody sued Google or others for this behavior?
How? You can't preemptively determine the output of a Turing-complete program without solving the halting problem, so while Google will always try to do their damnedest to predict a bad actor before they get to the store, they will definitely always fail to find some.
If they can't ban them when they find them, what should the alternative be?
This feels more like handwaving than brainstorming ;-)
It's a tricky problem and I think your suggestions should try and reflect that as much as possible.
You obviously can't eliminate all abuse but it can be managed to an acceptable degree with thoughtful design.
This is getting away from my larger point that the incentives here are screwed up. Why is that? Why doesn't Google fix their shit? What is blocking this from fixing itself? Usually there is an incentive like threat of lawsuit or people leaving the platform.
Yes, perhaps we could come up with a set of rules that users must abide by to use the service, such as not being abusive. And if they're found to be breaking these rules, we could then restrict their access to the service. The worst actors would have their access restricted permanently.
If you're suggesting "stop 100% of all abusive content before it happens," that's just silly.
There's something to be said for not shutting down someone unless they break a law. I do acknowledge the court would need to be much faster and easier to access for these kinds of things though, you don't want to burden a provider with enormous legal bills just to deal with this kind of thing.
If I host a service for manchester city fans, why would I not be able to ban annoying united fans? Who cares if what they do is legal. What if I post NSFW content here on hn. It's not illegal so it's okay?
Just this month content creators from Russia or belarus have been banned from dozen of services, they did not violate any law.
It's ridiculous to think that yout platform isn't free to apply it's own rules.
We're talking about platforms that are not so restrictive in their topics.
Unless you can prove in a court of law you're being restricted for illegal reasons, there's not much you can do.
Internet is full of stories of people losing their livehood overnight in these services and there isn't much one can do.
Flip side of this is compromised accounts, or those doing illegal or dangerous things would run far longer.
It's not the suspending that's the problem, it's the inability to find out why it was suspended, and the inability to get someone to reinstate your account.
We need enforcement of contract law (and maybe a prohibition on binding arbitration which would be a new law)
However today these "Terms of service" are not really treated like a normal contract, in a few ways
One most of them are massively one sided, which should make them unenforceable and disallowed. Also standard contracts most of the time require notification of specific violations with documentation of the violation that triggers termination of the contract, not these vague assertions that with no documentation of the violation. Also for the most part contracts do not allow these open ended catch all type of provisions most Terms of service have, there are exceptions of course but it seems to have enacted a completely different level of provisions for these "terms of service" agreements that would not be permitted in other contexts of contract law
Large companies shouldn't be able to get away with banning people without good reason, documenting and stating that good reason, and have a reasonable and "real" appeals process, with courts being the last step of the process if needed.
Want to ban that person harassing others? Sure thing, document the harassment, clearly spell out in your account termination email that harassment was the reason (and what even constitutes harassment), offer that appeals process. Document the decision and evidence, in case an independent mediator (like a court) asks for it. Don't just vaguely point to some 70-page "Community Standards" document, and have bots auto-respond with "Denied" emails to appeals.
As the German constitution law (Grundgesetz) spells out: "Eigentum verpflichtet. Sein Gebrauch soll zugleich dem Wohle der Allgemeinheit dienen." ("Property obliges. Its use should also serve the public good."). I think that's a good approach to property.
Why not? I understand that a lot of people don't like this behavior, but why should it be illegal? The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives. The fact that you see a problem does not mean the law/government can fix it.
Consider the law/government version of the old programmer's joke about regular expressions:
Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
Because these large companies are basically utility companies in my humble opinion, and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods. There are basically defacto monopolies in their respective spaces. This power and influence shouldn't go entirely unchecked. Same as we (try to) regulate other industries, often even players that are far "smaller" than the internet behemoths. Which brings me back to Eigentum verpflichtet.
>The law is a very blunt instrument, and government is already far too intrusive into every aspect of people's lives.
I see this argument a lot. First of all, we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there. And then, the law is quite often rather blunt, agreed, but it doesn't have to be that blunt.
Google's or Meta's "Community Standards" at the same time seem to be rather blunt as well, and the enforcement deliberately arbitrary.
>Some people, whenever they have a problem with behavior they don't like, think: Let's get the law/government to solve it! Now they have two problems.
At the least with the law/government[0], we have a theoretical control (through voting), theoretical checks and balances (through separation of power) and a theoretical way to have input into decision making (through activism, lobbying, opposition parties). We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
And not everything the government does is always bad. The government is the reason you're drinking a lot less lead in your water, that we do not let regular companies sell heroin solution as cough syrup anymore, or that banks aren't allowed to redline black people anymore (whether enforcement works is another thing), or dump their toxic waste in your backyard. In my parts of the world, the government even made it so that I do not have to fear going bankrupt and homeless when I lose a job or become ill, or that an employer cannot knowingly assign me jobs that will make me ill without even telling me about that risk.
Yeah, there are plenty of things the governments did and still do that are not great, or outright bad and/or evil, sometimes because a policy didn't work out the way it was expected and lead to bad outcomes, sometimes because a policy had exactly the indented outcome. And it usually takes quite some effort and time to change that.
At the same time, there are plenty of bad things large companies did and are still doing, more often than not to maximize profits, or at least for power and influence, and the only real incentives we have to make them stop is market pressure (i.e. boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work) or regulation (which works quite well, but can have the side effect of regulatory capture). Take the instrument of regulation away, because it's too blunt, or the government cannot be trusted, or whatever, and we'll end up (again[1]) with a bunch of companies that are defacto governments - but of the dictatorial variety.
To me, the solution neither is no regulation nor always regulation, but finding a good balance of what and what not to regulate, and how to regulate. The power balance between those large internet companies and their users/customers/subcontractors and "gig workers"[2] is skewed very heavily in favor of the large companies and thus I think could use some unskewing by regulatory measures.
[0] When I keep talking about government(s) here, I mean our democratic governments.
[1] The East India Company, for example, while still technically beholden to the Crown, had their own military, and made their own defacto laws in large parts of the world. It took the Indian rebellion, with a toll of close to 1M lives, and the British Government to reign them in.
[2] I would consider a lot of the small time app developers to be essentially gig workers, except they write code instead of taxing you around, while a major chunk of the financial and other profits goes to the app stores.
I could see the Internet itself being treated as a public utility (and US law already does this in some ways, for example by requiring ISPs to serve rural areas where there aren't enough users to make it profitable). But app stores are not. App stores are the way they are not because of any fundamental limitation of app distribution over the Internet, but because users have chosen that model. If developers want to "fix" that, they need to use their own market power to not use Google Play at all, so that users have to switch to a different model because there are no apps on Google Play. The government doesn't need to get involved in this.
> and wield a whole lot of power over people's lives and livelihoods
Google only has power over your livelihood as a developer if you let them. Which, as I've already commented upthread, is not a choice any sane developer should make given Google's track record. Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
> we're not even talking about regulating people, we talk about regulating companies worth billions and sometimes even trillions, so I am a little less concerned about being "intrusive" there.
Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete. It doesn't faze the companies that are worth billions and trillions; they just buy the regulations that favor them. Look up "regulatory capture". Governments can't effectively regulate companies of this size. But they can certainly regulate potential competitors to those companies out of existence.
> We do not have any of that when it comes to companies.
But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott. All those government avenues you describe are extremely weak, and continue to get weaker over time. The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government. Whereas in the free market, you can exercise your market power immediately by changing what transactions you do and do not choose to make.
> not everything the government does is always bad
The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered. And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides. You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
> boycotts or protests, which hardly ever work
Protests hardly ever work because they don't change the company's bottom line. Boycotts can and do work because they do change the company's bottom line.
> a bunch of companies that are defacto governments
Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that. Without the special privileges given to them by the British government, they would have been powerless to do the things they did.
> I would consider a lot of the small time app developers to be essentially gig workers
For Google (or Apple if they develop iOS apps), yes. Why? Why are developers continuing to feed these monsters?
Users have not chosen. App developers have not chosen. Apple has chosen and Google copied them.
Google and Apple effectively have a duopoly over app stores.
>Developers should simply stop distributing apps through Google Play if they don't like Google's behavior. That's how a free market is supposed to work.
No, the free market is supposed to work by having a seller and a buyer find each other and make a deal. However, with app stores, a middle man forcefully inserts itself into that equation in a way that cannot be sidestepped by buyer and seller. Some buyers and sellers are fine with it, but some is hardly all.
The option app developers have right now is to either be obedient to the app stores, or change profession.
>Regulating companies worth billions and trillions just makes it harder for companies that aren't worth billions and trillions to compete.
You're talking regulatory capture, which indeed is a concern. That's why I mentioned the "gatekeeper" definition of the upcoming EU DMA... It considers size and (market) power, and only regulates large companies.
>But you have something a lot more powerful: the ability to boycott.
Boycotts are a joke in general. They only work if you find a majority supporting that such a boycott, and often to a degree where it actually hurts. It doesn't do anything to protect any (large) minority. So when e.g. black people got redlined, were they supposed to boycott the banks that refused to do business with them in the first place? Because the white majority clearly didn't care enough; they got their loans, they were happy and content, and often didn't even really know about the plight of their fellow citizens.
>The US Congress has approval ratings in the single digits and incumbent reelection rates above 90 percent. That's a huge sign that you can't fix whatever problem you want to fix using the government.
The US political system can be changed. The Tea Party demonstrated that, Obama and Bernie and Trump demonstrated that (whether one agrees with these people is another matter, the point is that even in the US, which is plagued by the first-past-the-post voting, change is possible).
And you don't necessarily have to replace people, just make them fear enough that they might be replaced if they do not play ball. You could consider that a boycott at the ballot ;)
>The fact that the government does some good things does not mean government regulation is a good thing all things considered.
No, it doesn't necessitate that. But historically, it is, all things considered.
>And even with the "good" things you describe, you don't see their downsides.
Yeah, I somehow fail to see the downside of the government preventing companies from dumping toxic waste in my backyard, or government enabling me to get health care when I need it.
>You don't see what the world would have been like if people had chosen to use free market power to regulate those things instead of the government.
But I have seen that. I explicitly mentioned the East India company. I saw banks redlining people, fuel producers putting lead in gasoline, industry working people to literal death (making them sick, or working them in unsafe conditions) because human resources were cheap and replenish-able, and people were willing to do that work to avoid almost certain starvation and homelessness if they did not. And then there is this profession that doesn't care about laws anyway: narcos and other criminals. And they bring havoc wherever they go.
I have seen enough.
>Companies only get such power if governments give it to them. Your example of the East India Company illustrates that.
You're basically advocating for no government (or an entirely toothless government). In your system, the East India company would have existed, with one difference: It wouldn't have had to ask the monarch for permission first. They had power not just because of the special privileges (which they wouldn't even need in your no-government system), they had power because they had money. And that money allowed them to form an army and declare themselves rulers of India. If there was no British government, they'd still be ruler of India today (and probably quite a few other places).
>Why are developers continuing to feed these monsters?
Because they got dragged in with rosy promised of profits, became entangled in the network effects, and are now beholden to their feudal rulers, unless they want to be risky and change professions. Which they usually don't, until they are forced to, like the guy in the article probably will be.
That's like asking a person in a sweatshop why they still work there. Or the Uber driver who barely makes ends meet, or the amazon warehouse worker who wears diapers because a regular pee break would take too long.
Because there are no legal grounds for such a suit. Google is providing a service (Google Play developer accounts), and its terms of service clearly state that it can terminate any account whenever it wants. However nasty you might find this behavior in a moral sense, legally Google is perfectly within its rights to operate this way.
The only real response any developer can make to this is to not use Google Play to distribute apps. And certainly not to build a business on whose income you and your family will depend on it.
If anything it should be made easier to install programs without a "store" at all. Operating systems worked fine without this concept, and the play store and ios store are functioning as rent-seeking middle men, taking money without offering anything of value in return.