zlacker

>>benhur+(OP)
We need regulations to enforce adequate customer service and SLAs in these huge companies.

Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.

Facebook is exactly the same way.

When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.

>>jennyy+KE1
If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.