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Comment by jimnotgym | Hacker News Reader

These companies want to become as ubiquitous as a public utility. Therefore they should be regulated like a public utility

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Indeed. I think that if a person cannot participate in modern society without being a customer with only a few competitors to choose from, then such businesses should have a "universal service obligation" and not be allowed to refuse service without a good reason. Such a reason should be mediated by the legal system.

For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.

And the same for online businesses.

Suing isn't as useful as you'd expect. It costs $10,000's and months to even get to court.

Criminal liability for improper bans, and allowing citizens to directly charge the company with the crime (some states do this) would probably be more practical.

Alternatively, some variant of streamlined court (similar to small-claims court) could be established, where you could automatically use the court if the defendant had already been sued more than 10 times in the last decade for the last thing. The court would provide some sort of legal or financial resources to allow the customers to quickly sue without paying out of pocket, or spending much of their own time.

This could be solved with something like CFPB, but with the Chevron Deference repealed, courts are pretty much the only remedy now for anything until congress decides to write much more specific and in-depth laws.

The Digital Markets Act and/or Digital Services Act ought to have something to say about this, especially the "this secret decision is final and we refuse to say anything else" part of the story.

That wording sounds like the decision was made in Israel and not the US.

I would guess the shutdown requests came from Israeli security services. Thus it is final and not appealable and can also the reasoning can not be revealed.

However, if they've adversely affected an EU resident or even worse an EU national, the DMA forces them to allow an appeal and recourse.

I'm not familiar with what army the EU has to enforce that recourse. Ultimately, rights depend on the threat or actual application of force.

Microsoft have to choose whether to operate in the EU. There's been a long struggle between conflicting rules of US unaccountable intelligence access vs. EU privacy law ("safe harbour") that is relevant here. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/10/06/a-messa...

Honestly, the day may come when some US corporations decide operating in the EU is more trouble than it's worth. I don't really expect that--it's a big market--but it could happen.

Naturally — one cannot be a servant of two masters, and some US legislation does at least seem to be incompatible with EU legislation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems

Same is of course true for Chinese companies deciding to not bother operating in the USA, or UK companies deciding it's not worth the effort to operate in Argentina.

But it's not likely to be a big deal if it does, because software … how can I put this?

The saying goes "the first 90% takes half the time, the second 90% takes another half of the time, the third 90% puts you over-budget", etc. but that same effect also means it's easy to catch up most of the value even with something relatively mediocre.

The combined armies of every member state of the EU, if it came to that.

Well before that point, they can just go through a normal court process because the EU has been empowered by the governments of each member state to write such legislation.

DMA is enforcable by the member states of the EU rather than the EU itself. EU member states do indeed have armies.

The decision might just as well have been taken place on the moon, laws such as DSA, DMA, and GDPR tend to protect the resident and rarely cares where a decision affecting that resident was taken.

Example where GDPR tries to resolve the problem, but unfortunately not strongly enough: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_explanation#European_...

It's worse than that - they're gradually becoming a new form of governance - and one that you can't vote out.

The term "Facebook Jail" might be coined jokingly (and the consequences of being there are pretty trivial) but the mere existence of the term is a tacit acceptance of the idea of judicial oversight by a private corporation.

Yes, you can choose not to engage with meta or its products, or (less easily) Microsoft or Google - but we're close to the point where refusing to use the products of (and thus be defacto-governed by) one of the tech giants will have implications beyond self-imposed inconvenience.

Already you'll be excluded from a significant proportion of social plans if you don't have either WhatsApp or Messenger.

I used to disagree with this. Recent conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine (regardless of who you side with) made me change my mind.

How is it that some rich Californian CEO with their own bias and agenda can decide to shut off service to entire groups of people in an active war zone? These decisions could cost people their lives! That's insane.

I don't think that would help in this case: being regulated as a US public utility would still embargo Gaza and treat contact with it as radioactive.

I'm not sure that's true for what they would be regulated under: common carrier rules.

Case in point: gaza's area code isn't banned by us pots operators.

Regulations are why Microsoft is banning users who call Gaza.

The real solution here is to use Signal (or something like it).

And I don't mean to criticize Microsoft or regulations. Microsoft is faced with an impossible task here, I assume they're doing the best they can.

> Regulations are why Microsoft is banning users who call Gaza.

That sounds an awful lot like simply being a Palestinian is being criminalized.

The Israeli government position seems to be that any Palestinian may be deemed a combatant, which is even worse.

> I assume they're doing the best they can.

I think you mean “they’re doing the absolute minimum to barely meet their compliance requirements”

> Regulations are why Microsoft is banning users who call Gaza

I shall have to add this to the list of counterexamples wherever anyone says "America has an inalienable right to free speech".

>The real solution here is to use Signal (or something like it).

The article discusses that they are unable to contact their family over the internet because Israel is shutting off internet. So they were using Skypes Skype to Phone service to call their family's mobile phones over normal cell service in Gaza.

Interesting, I missed that. I wonder if there is a version of that service that isn't managed by Microsoft.

I don’t think that’s the real solution.

To be able to come up with a solution you’d first need to be aware of a problem, which in many such cases you wouldn’t be, until one day you are banned and lose all your accounts, and solutions in hindsight won’t help with that.

There should be market share limits on providing identity and currency, or those should just be handled to the government (like they used to be).

Similarly, big vertically integrated computing platforms should be broken up (in-house applications should have exactly the same access to APIs documentation, support, etc, as third party ones).

They're nothing like utilities and it makes no sense to treat them that way.

Instead the u.s. needs laws that protect user digital rights, and all companies should have to adhere to those laws, not just big ones.

That could have a huge chilling effect on start ups, indi devs, and hobbyists

Not at all, smaller players would be exempt. Only if the service becomes massive enough and starts to police their users with secret courts in this way do they get treated like a utility.

> smaller players would be exempt

Yesterday we had the discussion on FCC rules, and CE marking, from which small players are not exempt. There's no reason to assume there would be de minimis exemptions, there aren't for the GDPR.

So be it. From a user perspective it doesn't matter if a big company or a small company is abusing custody of user data.

I don't see the harm for start ups to think about their user's rights early on. Better it becomes part of their Startup DNA than having to learn it later and adopt their company.

Especially if they don't give you access to you data (impossible in the EU thanks to the GDPR). They have to be taken to court for this.

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