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.
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the organizations is have some strong form of identification that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar association (or whoever) can check that you are who you claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having people get public / private key pairs from the government (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a system.
P.s. thank you for the compliment!