Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

> of course Google will never tell you that or confirm or deny this

This is my problem with de facto utilities that are not regulated like utilities. Google can have enormous impact on your business and personal life but you cannot get proper communications with them. If something goes wrong you can't fix it, even if it's your fault because often you don't know what you did wrong. If it's their mistake, you might get a chance if your issue gets attention by a large audience.

It feels like there should be a legal recourse where you get compensated for damages due to service design choices of the utility. I'm sure in many places you can get compensated if the energy company cuts your electricity and doesn't clearly say the reason and what you can do about it.

You can lose your business, you can loose access to your digital assets that you built all your life and for what? So that some employees at Google can have easier time managing an issue(not disclosing the reason for account restrictions probably makes the scammers life harder too and you are just a collateral damage that doesn't even show up in the analytics).

Can you imagine E.ON cutting off the energy of the English futbol fans because it's easier for them to internally manage the surges during the games due to the tea kettles and not give them any explanation whatsoever?

Edit: Interestingly, UK GDPR seems to have some protections agains automated decision making[0].

[0] https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-data-protectio...

View on HN

So that some employees at Google can have easier time managing an issue(not disclosing the reason for account restrictions probably makes the scammers life harder too

Yet, while this is often the cited reason, it is simply not true.

There is no way on Earth, that scammers don't find out about such restrictions trivially, easily. So all this really does, is inconvenience the honest, and do zip, zero, nada to hassle the miscreants.

edit: more thought here, likely this is just an excuse, to not properly train reps, or to not deal with the issue at all.

It is the equiv of "think of the children!", but corp speak instead of politi speak. "Sorry for the bad service, security issue!"

The hilarious thing is that that excuse is essentially just security through obscurity. Which is especially rich coming from the company whose vulnerability research team famously set a hard disclosure deadline that was shorter than many others at the time.

The engineering reality is that, much of the time, information asymmetry is a big help when you’re an anti-abuse engineer trying to build systems that distinguish good traffic from bad. It’s not an “undisclosed vulnerability” to build a very effective heuristic that wouldn’t be effective if it were public knowledge.

That’s the kind of thing that’s useful for some random blogger’s personal domain and largely academic at Google’s scale.

you would be shocked at how effective simple things like this are at stopping 90%+ of the bad actors, leaving significantly less manual work to identify the remaining 10%

And Google aren't the only offenders here. On Tumblr (now owned by Automattic) the only support case type where you're guaranteed to NOT receive answers is for the reason "account termination".

Any company with revenue greater than a certain amount, like a billion a year, or even way less, should fall into some category of public regulation that sets certain standards for consumer support.

I would not place it by revenue but by amount of customers served

I see no problem at all on measuring it by market share, as a proxy of consumer choice. One just have to keep in mind that the market has to be localized, not aggregated at some huge population.

Market share isn't a good measure unless you can clearly define the market. Make it too narrow and they are at 100%< make it too broad they are near 0% ... especially complicated with products you don't (directly) pay for ...

Should be a county level at most.

But what's the market for Google, from which you're computing market share?

That could inadvertently sweep up popular labor of love projects with almost no revenue, like hobbyist communities or fan sites and so on.

A billion in topline revenue should do the trick. Once you hit that level you have to provide individualized human support. You're allowed to charge money for the support but it has to be available to anyone willing to pay at least a modest fee to communicate with a real person.

If you don't like it fuck you, you have a billion dollars get the fuck over it.

You're right. Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Anglo predisposition against "rude" language?

If a lonesome Pizza Hut franchise can afford to give me customer support, then so can Google, no questions asked. Yet you'll still find people white-knighting for them.

If you serve a lot of customers but have lousy revenue you should have extra regulations which would probably drive you out of business because of the extra cost? Revenue seems a lot more reasonable metric.

Maybe if your business sucks that much that you don't have enough margin to treat your customers well when they have issues... well, maybe your business just shouldn't exist.

That's your opinion. There are areas such as supermarkets that are low margin by nature and most definitely should exist

Supermarkets crucially already have a customer support infrastructure and you can physically go to them to work out issues. If the burden is simply to have human customer support you can speak to then the burden is already fulfilled.

It is absurd that it is impossible to speak to a human at Google unless you have a loud enough platform. Amazon is similar too in many cases. As an Amazon seller the robot once decided that the price for an item on sale wasn’t correct. I told the robot it was in fact correct. The customer support person who I was able to reach after an incredible runaround told me through text only communication that the solution was to change the price either higher or lower. There was no way they could manually verify it. The robot had decided. In the end it took multiple guesses of adjusting the price to figure out what the Amazon robot would accept. This is beyond stupid.

that's surprising; every support interaction i've had with amazon has been incredibly positive, and i'm a nobody...

It's stupid for you. It costs Amazon only some difficult to measure lost opportunity that can't even be cited during performance reviews.

It is pretty stupid that the people who work at Amazon can’t even override the faceless algorithm that makes arbitrary decisions. I don’t care about the metrics. I care about common sense.

And yet there are regulations around health and safety that supermarkets must follow.

And yet, supermarkets close down quite often to make a political statement or when margins aren't sufficiently high enough. Kroger is fond of closing stores in areas threatening to raise wages.

That indicates that a local monopoly exists.

Could be either/or.

If we have governments specifying what a company does in those circumstances, wouldn't you expect that they would mandate that Google not accept these credit cards? Accepting them sort of flies in the face of the whole "Know your customer" approach that it seems like every government is promoting.

Maybe, but that would be better than accepting them and then doing this.

Why on earth would Google pay lobbiests to write legislation like that for the government to make into law?! It's against their interests!

Not necessarily. Regulatory burdens ore more onerous on insurgents than on incumbents.

Yes because giving government more power can never go wrong.

> This is my problem with de facto utilities that are not regulated like utilities.

No, this is your problem with monopolies. The fix is anti-trust enforcement, not slapping the word "utility" around.

Antitrust enforcement is so scattershot, varying over time and depending on current us administration. It's like an entire higher level of abstraction over the problem. And in practice we have extremely little antitrust enforcement in the us over the last 20 years. We'd have to theoretically fix antitrust enforcement, then eventually "market forces" would force google say, to improve customer service.

Google is not going to change, they are one of the trillion dollar babies and they can just ignore us. Just like apple. What anti-trust enforcement could cause them to change? I'm skeptical the new EU rules about how "open install of apps to breakup app-store monopolies" will work to effect change.

Longer than that:

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/robert-borks-america...

Google should be broken up and forced to change.

Google ads are a natural monopoly, like power lines. What are you going to do, go to 1/3 of its ad customers and tell them they're switching to Southwestern Google while another 1/3 have to switch to Pacific Google?

This assumes Google search - the main reason they have a business - will remain popular. That’s a very big assumption.

Google’s monopoly isn’t “natural”. It’s temporary.

I was thinking of AdSense.

And then one of them becomes dominate after 5 years, and the other(s) fold. It's an inevitable problem. The only way to "break them apart" that would make any sense at all would be to break off distinct divisions, like Search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Cloud, etc. Into separate companies. Then forbidding them to acquire each other, and generally be extremely pessimistic/restrictive if any of them attempt to acquire any company at all.

Sounds like a good plan. I think the tech ecosystem would benefit greatly from more competition.

Nope, Google is utility. It is embedded on how the web works, it's not a matter of not having an alternative but it is a matter on Google defining how everything works. Whatever Google chooses to do, it becomes a standart. People design their products to fit Google's infrastructure.

When that infrastructure rejects you or your product, you are in trouble because everything is build around the assumption that you will be reachable over Google.

This is a horrible argument. If Google disappeared tomorrow the web wouldn’t lose anything but ads that I block anyway and you would go to another search engine.

I think this is about as silly as claiming that Microsoft controls how all computers work, or that Apple has the final say over every smartphone. Chrome has the advantage here, but that doesn't make them a defacto monopoly. If your definition was right, every other member of FAANG would probably have worse crimes to answer to wrt "defining how everything works". Even the people standing behind Apple have lost this fight, since even Safari has admitted it was wrong about PWAs. Plus, it's not like Google is all-powerful here. Negative public response got FLOC shelved before it hit Chrome betas, and they still don't have the gall to bring it up again.

Google is not a utility any more than Apple or Spotify is a utility. And if we're going to break up both of those companies, we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

> If your definition was right, every other member of FAANG would probably have worse crimes to answer to wrt "defining how everything works".

Now you're getting it.

> we may as well just dissolve every other Fortune 500 company while we're at it.

Sounds great. Let's start with Chevron.

Except I don't agree with their definition. Google's ability to "choose how things work" comes from their investment in the web as a platform for things like GSuite, Google Meet and more. Plenty of other companies have the ability to speak up, but none of the big players (Apple, Microsoft) do because it would sabotage their market position. So, Google is the only one left making significant changes, aside from open source contributors/committees.

> Sounds great.

Now you're grossly missing the point. The problem isn't the status quo, it's the system. Tearing down Standard Oil will leave a power vacuum, and adequate incentive from suppliers and processors will just make another monopoly. If your goal is to get rid of those companies, that's a pretty counterintuitive way to do it.

Personally, I think our world needs to start taking digital standards more seriously, like ISO but taken to the next level. We let ourselves get in these positions because we don't force these companies to provide interoperability or data ownership. Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale, but we need better regulation and more strict rules around proprietary interfaces. At least, that's the accelerationist mindset; we can languish in technological fiefdom for as long as we'd like, I'm sure FAANG doesn't mind.

GSuite doesn’t have that much market share and Google Meet is just another failing Google app.

> Now you're grossly missing the point. The problem isn't the status quo, it's the system.

That is my point. A system in which any of the fortune 500 companies can come into existence is grossly broken on multiple levels. Companies should be afraid of getting more than 10% of a worldwide market for fear of real anti-competition laws coming into effect rather than the farce we have now, or of vertically integrating too much, and should only make proprietary interfaces as a last resort.

A company being in a position to unilaterally change web standards, and force a monopoly on their web browser to further monopolise their advertising business should be grounds for splitting it into pieces at the very least, and seizing it in its entirety as the expected oitcome if they exercise that power.

> Capitalism can work in the tech sector at this scale,

The surveillance state and pending apocalypse we live in where you get jailed for successfully fighting in court says that it really can't. Any regulation or democratic control is ephemeral when you are systematically assigning more power to megacorps on a daily basis.

I think between the democracy we have in practice and the megacorps, most would choose the megacorps.

Partially /s. But in general, democracy isn’t doing too well, and a lot of it is due to a massive segment of bored, decadent, and petty populace that would rather watch the world burn if it owns their political enemies. At least with megacorps there is room for competence and science.

> But in general, democracy isn’t doing too well, and a lot of it is due to a massive segment of bored, decadent, and petty populace that would rather watch the world burn if it owns their political enemies.

This is what the megacorps being in control looks like because they're the ones that led us here through ownership of media and thus any political candidate with a chance. Facebook, microsoft and google are only just getting started in the same space, and it is already many times worse than fox ever was.

I agree, We need legal measures. Imagine OP getting the Google Account itself banned then the only hope is to write a blog and pray that it makes to the front page of HN. It's ludicrous that we've accepted that if the Internet service is operating at scale, There would be no mechanism in place to address the customer's grievances even if that customer is an advertiser.

The first time I tried using Microsoft Ads, I used a debit card in which foreign payments wasn't enabled and as soon as I clicked make payment my account was banned, No recourse through support just like how OP faced with Google. But that was in my past life, I don't want to see Ads, So I don't show Ads now.

I've been unable to close my Facebook Account, Because I couldn't take backup of my business page and there's no way to reach to them.

> This is my problem with de facto utilities that are not regulated like utilities.

I totally see that. But on the flip side we see utilities like phone companies unable to block abusive robocalls and scammers.

(My thoughts are my own, and they are rarely well-formed)

They are not unable, they are unwilling.

Before 2019, they were hesitant to do so over uncertainty as to whether it would be a violation of common carrier laws to do so. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-robocalls/fcc-set-to-...

Okay, and in the three years since then, have they made any progress? If not, why am I wrong if I think they may have just been using that as an excuse?

They have implemented the shake and stir protocol in the US.

Easy solution where that's not an issue.

Add an abuse button to the phone.

Every call costs a dollar to connect, no matter where it comes from - another carrier or international or whatever.

You get the dollar back if the receiver doesn't press the abuse button.

The dollar can be waived if the company knows the call is coming from an individual household with low call volume.

I do want to clarify that the phone companies making money from robocalls are not YOUR phone company. Phone companies that provide services to consumers lose money from robocalls, have to deal with unsatisfied customers, and really want both a technological and legal solution. The problem is a vast array of VoIP providers that let anyone with a valid credit card sign up and start pumping calls in real time. To them the revenue loss from people sometimes signing up with a stolen card and sending a bunch of scam calls is much smaller than that gained from having a low barrier for signup.

Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".

Perhaps even connect the call to a automated message that says, "we're sorry, <voip telco> has had its services disconnected for fraud. Goodbye"

But US phone companies don't want to do that because of the potential revenue loss.

That's the path the FCC is going down, with starting to implement "Know Your Customer" rules similar to banks that require them to gather enough information to prevent easily setting up fake accounts.

Starting to implement? They promised a fix like 2 years ago. I have about as much faith in the FCC accomplishing anything significant as I do in buying an extended auto warranty from a random caller.

I mean we were starting from a system that was basically e-mail, except where providers were required to deliver all messages without any discrimination or filtering. They had to create a new framework that allowed for carriers to choose not to deliver calls, interoperable technology to authenticate calls, and now close loopholes that are still allowing bad actors access to the phone network. It's a fundamental rearchitecting of how the phone network works that requires every single operator to make upgrades, so yeah it's going to take some time. And you're not really going to see much progress until it's nearly finished because if 90% of the network is secure you'll just see the same volume of crap through the remaining 10%.

That date has already passed and it is still a serious issue. Not to mention the billions we handed out to telecom companies to assist with upgrades that they just pocketed.

You don't need to go all orwellian though. Just charge a security fee that makes spamming or scamming unprofitable for every call and add a simple way for the recipient to mark calls as wanted or unwanted.

Wanted calls get a refund.

> Unfortunately, at this point the solution is to play hardball and say "start either vetting your customers better or providing us with accurate uuids so we can block/report them for you, otherwise we will no longer route calls originating from your voip service".

Then this becomes a backdoor way for the bigger players to discriminate against new, smaller players that are otherwise legit and doing their best to keep spammers/scammers off of their network.

The absence of these problems in a big part of the world will tell you the problem is not, and never has been, technical. It's a political problem, or rather the problem with the leadership of US telcos.

That's fine, then the offenders would be the robocallers and the issue can be solved by targeting the robocallers. If it isn't being solved it's probably because they don't want to solve it.

E-mail spammers went to jail, I don't see why robocallers don't go to jail. It's way easier to locate them anyway. If we can fight spam mail, spam calls can be dealt with too.

We didn't solve e-mail spam by jailing people.

We didn’t solve e-mail spam

Unless you mean 'so we should jail more of them', GP's making the same point. (Not 'I didn't get where I am today by' tone as I initially read it and suspect you may have.)

No, not suggesting jail, just lamenting I get daily spam through my gmail and other email accounts. Not to mention the recruiter spam that would be basically impossible to stop.

Robocalling seems like a much more tractable problem to solve though.

I believe email spam and Robocalling should both be subject to harsh punishments, even more so if it is sexually explicit spam being sent to minors.

If you murder someone, you go away. If you rob 100 million people of 0.00001% of their life, you just did the equivalent of 100 murders. Seems no less criminal to me - in fact more so.

Seems pretty solved to me, at least for hard spam. The soft spam of useless marketing messages from companies that do have a legitimate reason to have my contact info is a harder problem.

We actually did. My gmail get's none

But gmail accomplished that by refusing to deliver legitimate mail too. It's worse than the spam floods we used to have.

My gmail regularly gets spam

Sure, yet I'm quite happy to see some jailed spammers :)

The point is, we are not hopeless. Actually, the e-mail thing was and is quite more problematic with accusations of gatekeepers(domain blacklists) asking for money but at least you know what's happening an how to solve it.

You're happy to see people go to jail for sending spam? This seems crazy from my perspective. It seems to me like a minor offense that wouldn't require jail time (and where jail would be counterproductive).

Of course if you are actually talking about scammers then I can understand your perspective, even if I'm not sure I would agree either.

I don't see it as a minor offence at all, spam distracts me and breaks my flow and spends my cognitive energy and as a result makes me underperform. I like putting all my attention to the stuff I'm engaged with and it makes me very angry when interrupted with something irrelevant. I do often try to track back spam calls or spam mails to make sure that I'm an expensive target.

Some people can be better at dealing with that kind of annoyances, good for them.

You want to send to jail everyone who distracts you and breaks your flow ? This seems extreme to me. Maybe you can take less extreme actions to avoid this, like putting your devices in "do not disturb" mode while you need to work.

No, I don't want to send everyone who distracts me to jail. When someone distracts me in person I tell them to come back later, no jail time imposed. Someone sends me an e-mail about something but I'm not interested? No problem, I'll tell them thanks but no thanks. Call me for feedback on your product I purchased last month? No problem, if I'm available I will talk to you and if I'm not I will ask you to call later - no jail time required. You want to sell me an upgrade to my plan? OK, let me hear it now if I'm available or call me back in few hours of this is not a good time - jail free.

On the other hand, I would like strong punishment for people who make inconsiderate noise(bikes, prayers, street vendors) or directly reach me without addressing me directly(spam mails, robocalls). The problem with those is that they saturate my attention without having anything for me in it. It is very cheap for them and very expensive for me. That's why I try to make it expensive for them too, usually by engaging with them and making it unpleasant and unprofitable conversation and even making them spend money on stuff like shipping only to have it returned.

For those, jail is the civil alternative. I would be completely fine with anything more brutal, I have no sympathy. How can I have sympathy when their engagement is not a human one, its automated impersonal engagement designed to drain my time and resources for their gain.

Excessive punishment for minor infractions is a hallmark of an authoritarian police state, where the government selectively enforces laws in order to jail people it doesn't like.

I don't want to live in that society. I, too, get very annoyed when there's an unreasonable amount of outside noise encroaching into my private space, but the right way to fix that is to address the societal ills that cause people to engage in antisocial behavior. Yes, that's a lot harder than just throwing everyone in jail, but that is the only way you're going to create a healthy society.

It's alright, I don't have any juridicial power. I simply desire their demise(slow and painful one). In case I acquire some, we can discuss what's the proper punishment for spammers.

I'm assuming they are thinking more about fraudulent spam, Nigerian prince's and fake goods and the like, rather than just advertisements for real products spam

Spam is literally attacking communication infrastructure and stealing money. It is a form of cyberterrorism. Not to mention the sexual spam that is sent to minors non-stop. The fact that you think that is like speeding is messed up.

Isn't sending porn to minors already illegal? That should definitely be illegal, but I don't see why all spam needs to be criminalized to the level of cyberterrorism.

Scams are already illegal under anti-fraud laws.

Why should spam that isn't already criminalized (fraud/illegal porn distribution) be treated as a significant crime?

Take 1 life, go to jail. Take .00001% of 100 million lives, go to jail. Seems logical & fair & socially constructive to me, like justice should.

Because the only way to stop it would be at a federal level. If it originates on domestic soil and is traceable, then it could be a states issue with civil punishment, but most spam comes from overseas and the most effective solution would be to treat it as a serious foreign affairs issues and start heavily sanctioning countries that can't get it under control.

They could have used any spam filters they might have written to simply flat numbers so their customers could decide what to do for themselves. Instead we have to rely on third party services (and thus share private information with those parties).

Why doesn't iOS support "Send straight to voicemail any caller not any my address book" ?

Settings -> Phone -> Silence Unknown Callers.

It allows callbacks from numbers you’ve called recently which is nice.

For texts there’s “Filter Unknown Senders”

Go to Settings > Focus > Do Not Disturb > move the toggle next to Do Not Disturb > to ON position and tap on the People tab.

> Google can have enormous impact on your business and personal life

Only if you let them. Life without a Google account doesn’t require meaningful sacrifice.

Neither did life without Standard Oil.

There's a latent assumption here that big tech isn't already regulated by the US government, albeit in a hidden manner or a manner you don't like.

Companies need to manage risk. Presumably cards like this present a larger risk.

Perhaps Brex is miscategorized as a privacy card.

Sure, I have no objection on that. The problem is that they don't communicate it and you need to guess. With Google, you don't have someone explaining you what's the problem and what you can do to fix it.

Right, and even if it's true that disclosing the detailed reason for a ban would hurt their security posture (I doubt it), I think in most cases it should be pretty obvious when the person disputing a suspension is just someone who got caught in the algorithmic crossfire.

But expending even the smallest amount of effort to determine that isn't something Google feels like spending time or money on.

Then don’t do that?

There is absolutely nothing that Google offers that you can’t get from somewhere else.

The GDPR is useless though because they don't tell you why.

You're just left guessing as to what the problem may have been, not that you can do anything even if you did know. I've had the same problem with eBay.

Problem is it encourages the very behaviour they want to stop. If you're going to have an account thats central to your business, but can get shut down at any time, it just encourages burner accounts so you aren't left high and dry when the inevitable happens.

This is a recipe for a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare .

As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.

There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.

Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.

Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.

Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.

The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!

This is such a naive take on this issue. Just because it is possible to live without Google doesn’t make it easy. Even if you try to actively avoid all of these companies you’re still going to most likely end up with your data harvested via third parties fed back into their machine meaning you’re still padding their bottom line. People are not going to suddenly switch to Linux on the desktop or Google-services free android forks en masse because they’re demanding better services.

Maybe they die and get replaced but in between that happening you are still having to deal with the realities of the situation you are currently. People just want shit that works and for most of them it does most of the time. But some people get absolutely fucked and there is no good excuse for it.

Who is talking about Linux on the desktop? It’s dead easy to avoid Google completely for average people. The Microsoft ecosystem is one way, at least on PCs and tablets. There is also the Apple ecosystem, which can easily avoid Google entirely down to the phone level, and not get anything harvested due to copious privacy features.

People get fucked with Google accounts all the time, yes. The excuse is that Google is made of humans. As is the government. Or Apple and Microsoft for that matter. Some of these humans are better at software than others. If you think this is an easily solvable problem through laws and regulations, that regulators are going to get software design and support processes right… I think you might not have studied the history of of such laws and regulations. The good ones take decades to get right.

The benefit of not enshrining these companies as a public utility, and thus guaranteeing a mandatory mediocre experience for decades, is that it encourages the use and creation of alternatives. That dies when you legislate features.

You mentioned those other companies as well though. So if you’re trying to avoid all of them then you are backed in to a corner and no average person is ever going to do so. It really isn’t that complicated. I’m not asking for the government to audit the software. However I don’t think it is too much to ask for an actual support channel. It is insane for a company that touches almost ever person on earth in some way to be impossible to reach for support.

I don’t even think the problem is that the company is made of humans. The problem is that when the black box algorithm makes a decision that locks someone out of their account or some service/feature there is no recourse. The humans are the solution to the problem, but you can’t get them to look at it unless you have a platform to stand on. It’s disgusting.

But some human made that algorithm. ML models are alchemy, no one understands how they work fundamentally, so they're very susceptible to human bias. James Mickens USENIX '18 keynote is a great laugh/cry view of this.

Regulations mandating a support channel of some sort is reasonable.

Also, I don't think it's reasonable to say a person needs to be free of ALL those companies. Decentralized for-profit organizations are how we get things done as a society, mostly. Pick the companies you trust/value. My point was mostly about avoiding ad-revenue-driven companies.

I think then we are actually a lot more on the same page. Not the read I got initially but this is my general feeling on the issue. Appreciate the discourse.

I think giving government more power is much more naive. I can get from under a company much easier than a government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com