This is a recipe for a dystopian bureaucratic nightmare .
As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.
There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.
Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.
Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.
The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!
This is such a naive take on this issue. Just because it is possible to live without Google doesn’t make it easy. Even if you try to actively avoid all of these companies you’re still going to most likely end up with your data harvested via third parties fed back into their machine meaning you’re still padding their bottom line. People are not going to suddenly switch to Linux on the desktop or Google-services free android forks en masse because they’re demanding better services.
Maybe they die and get replaced but in between that happening you are still having to deal with the realities of the situation you are currently. People just want shit that works and for most of them it does most of the time. But some people get absolutely fucked and there is no good excuse for it.
Who is talking about Linux on the desktop? It’s dead easy to avoid Google completely for average people. The Microsoft ecosystem is one way, at least on PCs and tablets. There is also the Apple ecosystem, which can easily avoid Google entirely down to the phone level, and not get anything harvested due to copious privacy features.
People get fucked with Google accounts all the time, yes. The excuse is that Google is made of humans. As is the government. Or Apple and Microsoft for that matter. Some of these humans are better at software than others. If you think this is an easily solvable problem through laws and regulations, that regulators are going to get software design and support processes right… I think you might not have studied the history of of such laws and regulations. The good ones take decades to get right.
The benefit of not enshrining these companies as a public utility, and thus guaranteeing a mandatory mediocre experience for decades, is that it encourages the use and creation of alternatives. That dies when you legislate features.
You mentioned those other companies as well though. So if you’re trying to avoid all of them then you are backed in to a corner and no average person is ever going to do so. It really isn’t that complicated. I’m not asking for the government to audit the software. However I don’t think it is too much to ask for an actual support channel. It is insane for a company that touches almost ever person on earth in some way to be impossible to reach for support.
I don’t even think the problem is that the company is made of humans. The problem is that when the black box algorithm makes a decision that locks someone out of their account or some service/feature there is no recourse. The humans are the solution to the problem, but you can’t get them to look at it unless you have a platform to stand on. It’s disgusting.
But some human made that algorithm. ML models are alchemy, no one understands how they work fundamentally, so they're very susceptible to human bias. James Mickens USENIX '18 keynote is a great laugh/cry view of this.
Regulations mandating a support channel of some sort is reasonable.
Also, I don't think it's reasonable to say a person needs to be free of ALL those companies. Decentralized for-profit organizations are how we get things done as a society, mostly. Pick the companies you trust/value. My point was mostly about avoiding ad-revenue-driven companies.
I think then we are actually a lot more on the same page. Not the read I got initially but this is my general feeling on the issue. Appreciate the discourse.
As soon as it's illegal to make design mistakes, there will be no more innovation or updates, everything stays exactly as it is. The Department of Design Friendliness will audit you quarterly. Improvements get designed and approved by government committees. It's like a scene out of the movie Brazil.
There seems to be this mindset of a certain class of folks that feel these companies [Google, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, etc.] are somehow entrenched for centuries and the only option . They're not. They're barely 20 years old in most cases. That's nothing historically speaking. A third of them will be failing into niches over the next decade. Capitalism sucks in many ways, but it is really good at "creative destruction". True monopoly power is rare.
Many are extremely vulnerable to disruptive competition as most of their revenue is from a single source: ads. Take that away, and they crumble. As Facebook and Twitter are discovering now that Apple/iOS default to blocked app tracking. Google search quality has plummeted and people are turning to alternatives like Reddit.
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon are less vulnerable to ads, but they too have vulnerabilities.
Google isn't a utility: you don't need to use it, nor do most people. Google search is dying in favour of alternatives like Reddit. Google mail is only one of many options. Android phones are only one of many options.
The solution for a better service is to build (if you're an entrepreneur) and use (if you're a consumer) better services!