> I'm a little sympathetic to Google here, because there's no way that they can offer real customer service to the entire Internet. I run some small businesses and get dumb phone calls all of the time from confused people thinking that my random shop has anything to do with their phone plan or email issues or a problem with their cable bill or anything else under the sun because they ended up at my store after putting certain keywords into Google
In part I want to agree with you because I get the same version of random calls but for different reasons. But the truth is the difference between what we (or anyone) is doing and what google is doing is google makes plenty of money that they can use to throw at the problem.
The fact that you give something away at no charge (but actually make money or even if you don't make money) is not a reason you can then walk away and not have any responsibility at all for anything and everything. (Or shouldn't be).
> 3) The solution for Google is really easy though: charge some fee for human support that keeps customer service requests to a manageable level. When it's a genuine issue, people will pay some fee to get an actual trained person to pay attention to and hopefully resolve.
So you have to wonder then what is the reason they don't do this as many probably (including myself) have thought of the same thing. Sure they do have that with business email (google workspace).
> 4) I'm sure people have committed suicide and lost jobs because of the consequences from Google blocking their account without any recourse. This is definitely not an acceptable state of affairs, and I'd suggest avoiding using Google products whenever possible until this reprehensible behavior is changed.
This is most likely true and was also true with certain other products of companies let's even say Microsoft. Imagine the amount of frustration (falling short of suicide I mean) that people have as a result of using product that don't work or offer little or no support.
Also another point (that you didn't make) is the behavior by google then enables all sorts of other companies who would never act that way (and have no reason to) to act the same way (similar again to what happened when the first PC's came out). In many cases the end users became the beta testers for products (and they still are) that are released to early.