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Comment by wmf | Hacker News Reader

It's ridiculous that this is necessary but I salute people for using the legal system instead of just feeling helpless.

Just to actually say what is probably obvious.. this means that corporations have found a way to outsource the costs of providing customer support to the tax paying general public, including those who are not even using their services and never heard of the company.

Ag’s should not be requesting that this is fixed, but requiring it in no uncertain terms, and giving out massive penalties for every single time it’s allowed to happen. If the legal system takes “only” a few years to get wise to the fact that this is just indirect theft, I would say the damages in terms of wasted time are easily in the millions, and plus the opportunity cost of whatever work they did not get to while handling frivolous stuff like this.

I don't think it's really true that they've outsourced the costs. Meta sending one of their lawyers to defend the company in small claims court a single time would be hundreds of thousands of times the cost of resolving the case using a customer service rep. Of course, this approach also generates costs for the taxpayer, which sucks for everyone.

> I don't think it's really true that they've outsourced the costs.

Sure they have because only 1 in N (for some very large N) of facebook users who have been wronged by facebook are going to have the time and knowledge to navigate the small claim process. So while that lawyer is more expensive than a customer support agent, if they only have to respond to one millionth (or so) of the complaints, huge win for facebook, at the cost of the taxpayers.

But their lawyers are probably staff or have retainers anyway, so I doubt it costs them anything extra. Meanwhile if the legal system has to staff up and/or ignore other work then that cost is real

If enough different people sued Meta their legal department would be snowed under, and they'd have to increase the number of lawyers they employ. For every lawyer you employ to do what is in essence customer service, you could be employing several customer service employees.

It would, however, be funny if Meta was sued into oblivion by millions of Facebook users. Poetic justice.

they can't do the usual work of checking contracts and tracking law changes and handling other more serious lawsuits... so does it mean Meta employs someone with a bar exam to answer support tickets at the courthouse?

The small claims system is arguably the right place for such stuff (malfeasance by businesses towards customers) by design, but whether it is properly funded for that is another matter. I do think it would make some sense to levy some kind of tax in proportion to customer count (however determined) on businesses that would be used solely to fund the system.

AGs aren't dictators. They have no direct power to levy penalties. Which specific law do you think Meta is breaking here? Please to provide an exact citation.

IANAL, but let's be real, it's essentially a DoS attack, which the Facebooks and Comcasts of the world have enthusiastically and successfully prosecuted in the past. In a perfect world, we would just replay any abuse-of-service lawsuit that they won in this area back against them. Without even invoking cybercrime, a quick search says that DoS against private interests has apparently been prosecuted under chattel trespass and ToS violations, etc. I would think the government can take care of itself at least as well as private corporations when it's roused to anger.

Honestly though, public outrage alone may be enough to decide the case, since at the highest levels judges seem to ignore precedent and do whatever they want anyway. This isn't a low-level patent-troll making a living off a little light abuse of the system, these are billion dollar companies that are not only screwing people, but then getting us to pay for downstream effects as well.

You haven't addressed the legal issue. Courts have generally found DoS attacks to be a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030, which doesn't apply to the issues in this article. So, which law has Meta broken? Please to provide a specific citation.

But from a political standpoint I completely support AGs making public statements about anti-consumer behavior. There's nothing wrong with calling out Meta for being jerks.

Public nuisance. Don't bother trying to explain why some statutory language you googled and skimmed doesn't apply.

Please provide a case law citation to show how state public nuisance laws would apply here. Or are you just making things up?

Sealioning is tedious bro. Why not try to actually contribute something yourself, spend your own time and effort to show us how it doesn’t apply.

Low effort comments without addressing the issue at hand are tedious "bro". Why not try to show us how an existing law does apply instead of making up nonsense. The level of legal illiteracy on HN is disappointing.

> AGs aren't dictators. They have no direct power to levy penalties.

They can make life fairly miserable for you, though. (I'm sure there's various consumer protection laws they can leverage in these sorts of cases that vary from state to state.)

If the people they represent continue to feel unheard, you get things like the GDPR. "Everything we're doing is legal!" as a response to shitty behavior is a good way to get new law written.

I don't know how small claims court works, doesn't the loser have to play for the court cost? Shouldn't that cover it?

> Ag’s should not be requesting that this is fixed, but requiring it in no uncertain terms, and giving out massive penalties for every single time it’s allowed to happen.

Or just write up criminal charges and arresting the CEO of Meta the next time he sets foot in their state.

A weekend in a county jail might realign his priorities?

My parents had to resort to this to break out of their contract with AT&T when mobile service went to absolute shit following the 4g rollout. Repeated trips to the local store were met with them waving vaguely at the service map and refusing to do a site survey, calls to corporate were stonewalled. After 6 months of this, they called the AG. It was resolved within a week and AT&T let them out of the contract without penalties.

It is a damn shame that people have to go nuclear like this, but sometimes it is the only option.

I had a problem with my carrier as well with porting my number over. Attempting to interact with their customer service was a painful loop where nothing was resolved.

After a week I submitted an FCC complaint online (it was very straightforward) and issue was resolved in 24 hours.

During the start of covid I was considering buying a pulse oximeter and it annoyed me that some listings on Amazon were using “FDA approved” in listing and logo and I found it was easy to report them to FDA and their listing was taken down.

One time I was frustrated that a large and popular NYC-based physical store was charging sales tax for clothing under $110 (in NYC clothing and shoes under $110 have 0% sales tax) and I tired reporting to a state authority but I never even got an acknowledgment that complaint was received :/

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