I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary.
If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
They do this stuff because people _need_ them and they know that people won't just drop them en mass.
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
And that's also why monopolies and giant corporations can and will always form in the current economic system. Crony capitalism is not a bug, it's a feature.
Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason losing your Google account is so impactful is that it controls everything from access to apps on your phone to your email to your calendar to being able to chat with friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say, Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN comment.
No startup can compete with Google for those services because Google can artificially offer them for free, and for very high quality, because it's all funded by their advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would have to "do things that don't scale" and offer real customer support... which also costs money.)
It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google is surviving because they offer the best value to customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from the service being offered. And in the other direction, potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being tracked by) Google ads.
Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions of a market-based economy - that companies that provide more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to exist.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
You can. I might be able to (there’s a lot of crap around spam filtering and SPF that I’d have to fight with).
My mother, father, sister, cousins, nieces and nephews? Not a chance in hell.
We have an admin who spends a good 40% of his workweek doing just our email servers. They are a massive PITA.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
Meanwhile, I'll be pushing my representative for regulatory action.
...until your upstream changes something.
There have been a number of really great projects coming through HN and other sites recently that are aimed at solving some problem that people on Facebook have: photo sharing, event planning, etc.
Discoverability is really the only problem left.
You'll very quickly discover why they are not at all alike.
I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.
I don't see the impediment here.
Water/Sewage and Trash are typically run by the city/county government, although it is common for the actual work to be handled by a contracted company.
Power, natural gas, phone, and most others is almost always a private company.
2. You'll die in three days without water. You'll probably be healthier if you spent three days without Facebook.
3. I can't collect water for myself where I live. I suppose I could walk down to the lake, and manually bring up a few buckets of water, but it won't be safe for me to drink. I suppose I can also go buy bottled water, at a ~million-percent markup. There is no economic alternative for me to get water, other than through the water pipes laid to my apartment, by my water utility. I am a completely captive customer for my utility. My water utility has monopoly control of special-purpose one-of-a-kind infrastructure that is used to deliver water to my apartment. That is why my utility is regulated.
4. Unlike with my tap water, there are plenty of functioning alternatives to... Whatever it is that Facebook does for me. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, my life would be mildly disrupted for a week or two, and then would go on with little change.
On the hierarchy of needs, we have air at the top, followed closely by water, shelter, and food, followed at some distance by electricity, and way down the street, that we can barely make out, by grabbing a pair of binoculars, we will see 'Facebook'.
It's just not that important.
Google isn't at the point it needs to be nationalized, but something needs to be done to limit the fallout that occurs when users are kicked off essential services with no recourse.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.