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>Google's average employees aren't quite as smart as public perception portrays.

Intelligence is a funny thing. People can be the world’s foremost expert in whatever the heck, don’t matter for my point, and be utterly incompetent in every other area of their life if someone else is picking up for them. Think of career scientists giving humiliating public speeches for the first time since high school (industry conferences notwithstanding). That’s not their specialty and they have no reason to be talented at public speaking if they’re not trained in public relations and speaking. Don’t expect a Googler to be able to tie their shoes, drive a car, navigate public transportation or experience empathy just because they get high scores in leetcode. They’re not dependent skills and assuming they are is a sure sign of insufficient critical thought.

As far as your solution goes, hard pass. Providing support should be required by law. If you run a service that people depend on for any of the requirements of modern life then you should provide real live human support 24/7/365 or be liable for treble damages and equal fines for all harm this corner cutting costs. If my power goes out my electric company contacts me and tells me how they’re responding before I can even dig out their number. Google is equally important and the sooner people accept the new reality these technocrats have created for us the better off we’ll all be.

> Providing support should be required by law.

I'm always extremely wary of the unintended consequences of legislation, and I think such a requirement could create really negative incentives. If organizations were forced to be on the hook for customer service of anything they put online, creating any free stuff would present a business risk. You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

> You could say goodbye to many free services online with such a path forward.

Maybe that's worth it?

Not for me, but got some good news for you. If you just use services that meet your needs (offer customer service to your standard), you are already set. Don’t try to use the monopoly that is supposed to work for all of us against me and many others. That makes one a tyrant.

Maybe not "anything they put online" but "anything they put online and require account, reserving an option to terminate it without any human appeal path".

I don't need support for Google Search, but would definitely need it for Gmail.

>Providing support should be required by law. If you run a service that people depend on for any of the requirements of modern life then you should provide real live human support 24/7/365 or be liable for treble damages and equal fines for all harm this corner cutting costs.

Yes, exactly this! Unfortunately many people will see this as socialism and reject this kind of regulation.

A lot of people also believe the unintended consequences would either take away many things people love, or that it would be so commonly violated as to be toothless and become legislative tech debt.

Your solution would be an unfunded mandate. That's fine if you accept the tradeoffs, but as others have said, the practical upshot is that open-registration services like free Google accounts would just not exist any more.

The electrical company's situation is not comparable. You can only get an account by proving you own a property they already run a line to, and at some point, they need to go out and physically run that line to hook you into their grid. If registering a Google account was similar, then sure, they could be expected to provide a similar level of service, but no more anonymous accounts, no more duplicate accounts from the same person, and no 10 figure user base. This, of course, would mean they're no longer as important to you as electricity because the network size is likely the reason you think that.

I disagree. The service is free; they aren't obligated to do anything. If you want support, pay for it, via Fastmail or the like. People think they are entitled to not only a free email provider, but also free drive storage, free google docs, free search, free SSO, free calendar, and now free support. You're not entitled to any of that.

> 2) 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. I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet.

I think you are way to sympathetic to Google here. Just look at what the size of your company is compared to Googles in terms of profit/revenue. So they should be able to spend that much more time/resources on dealing with customer support even if that means dealing with some stupid folks calling then because they can't find the chrome icon on their desktop. I mean you are able to deal with stupid requests why should they?

> 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.

Warning: totally hypothetical controversial opinion follows (I'm playing the devil here):

From a game theoretical perspective, if you had to pay for support what prevents Google from intentionally blocking the accounts of random people so that they'll have to pay to contact support, who will then unblock the user?

That sounds like a case for regulation. If the support fee doesn't exceed a certain level, it would be hard to much money with support. Basically it should only cover actual costs, because it would unethical to earn money from problems they have caused.

Regulation here is a deus ex machina.

> I have no doubt that Google would receive hundreds of thousands of mostly dumb, useless calls daily that they are not responsible for from every confused person out there. There's no feasible way to provide standard customer service to the entire Internet.

Perhaps it doesn't have to be 'standard' but... they seem to have no problem identifying user behaviour and tweaking the heck out of their sites (and arm twisting other sites) to increase conversions, decrease wait times, and otherwise 'optimize' users/visitors towards a certain goal (click these ads, etc). It shouldn't be beyond them to employ or develop some better algorithms to help with identifying real customer support issues and offering some degree of support (pair or otherwise). Hey - they could even sell that service via GCE and let other companies also use their customer service tool... and recoup their investment in it...

> 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.

> 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).

I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever.

It really sucks that Google's business plan is totally cool with leaving some of us behind, but I'd rather take the risk that comes with the territory rather than not see these products get created in the first place due to onerous obligations.

If Google just offered no support for their free products, that would be one thing that might be a little understandable. But they even treat their customers for their paid products this way.

> > 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).

> I'm very sympathetic to OP's situation, I have also lost an account with years of irreplaceable emails to Google's finicky algorithms. But this right here is a slippery slope I would never wish for. Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support. I should be able to release a product (whether open-source, free, or paid) and decide for myself and my business the level of support I want to provide, without an obligation to respond to everyone, or maintain it forever.

I argue there is a big difference between giving something away as open source and giving something away and indirectly making money through e.g. advertising. For example if there are two game companies one makes a game that you have to pay for to play and the other makes money through in game ads, should they both not give the same support for their games? The users pay for them just in different ways.

> I argue there is a big difference between giving something away as open source and giving something away and indirectly making money through e.g. advertising.

True. But OP's reply misses the point which is 'causes pain'.

> Offering a free product should absolutely not entitle any random user to any kind of support.

Quibble they aren't offering free 'products' they are offering free services. Offering free products is a anti-trust violation commonly referred to as dumping. Proper thing to do is extend antitrust to services.

> 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.

This line of thinking is based on a fundamentally flawed view of google. In almost all cases, you are _not_ the customer. You are the product. A business does not provide service to it's product. The farmer does not provide counseling and custom beds for all of their cows. They make sure that overall the heard is healthy. They cull the old or the sick, and except for the monetary loss if one runs off or gets eaten (free range cattle) they generally don't care.

You are not the customer. You are the cattle. You output useful data which google spends a lot of money collecting, and then turning around and selling to their customer: the adverstiser.

They have a massive pile of money in no small part because they do not build massive service centers staffed with thousands of people who each need health care and computers.

> 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.

they already do this. Google's enterprise products do come with some level of support. Not saying it's "good" support, but this is an existing thing.

> This line of thinking is based on a fundamentally flawed view of google. In almost all cases, you are _not_ the customer. You are the product. A business does not provide service to it's product.

Who is the product when a musician plays at an arena? Great you quoted a saying that came up post internet but that in no way absolves them of any behavior they might do. I can't believe in all seriousness you will compare people humans to either animals or 'products'. Absurd.

> They have a massive pile of money in no small part because they do not build massive service centers staffed with thousands of people who each need health care and computers.

No issue with people making money. And as I said doesn't matter if they make money or not anyway. The fact is you should not have a service free or otherwise that people use that causes as much anxiety and pain.

> charge some fee for human support

That is an obvious conflict-of-interest situation; its optics are indistinguishable from ransomware.

"Your unlucky account was randomly trashed by an account-wrecking bulldozer algorithm; please pay a ransom fee to the purveyors and operators of the algorithm to restore access to your data".

That's a great counterpoint that's been brought up many times before in this type of discussion. My response to that is this.

1) A genuine effort here to avoid this moral hazard might be to have a policy to refund all/most of the fee paid if the user was found to have done nothing wrong, as well as some transparency in the overall process (publish some sort of stats of their customer service efforts) to keep some kind of public view on the situation.

2) Even if Google does essentially "extort" some people, I think the downside of maybe having to pay a fee needlessly is worth the upside of having some actual recourse possible in the event of a real emergency. Again, businesses die and people lose their jobs when Google messes up. Having a flawed recourse would be a better state of affairs than no recourse at all.

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.

I don't know of any Google-specific stories, but this has happened to people reliant on other tech companies and, more often than not, it was intentional. Most of the targets are foreign nationals, because they try to buy American "troublemakers" off first, but there are a couple high-profile cases of this sort of thing happening in the US.

We live in a strange time wherein corporations can act with a complete absence of accountability, especially if the out-of-touch, rich, geriatric men who write our laws can be hoodwinked into thinking that abuse of technological leverage is somehow impossible (because the mechanisms are beyond what they personally understand).