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Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

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Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No! 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 does…

"Regulation" also gave us things like a rapid reduction of deaths in cars ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... ) and airliners ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#/media/File:Fa... ), and it's hardly illegal to start a Google competitor. "Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.

And yet, we're static in that most of our crash tests are done the same way they have for years. They haven't started testing cars crashing at 60+ miles per hour. So while these regulations are great, it's also competition that's caused us to get better safety in some ways.

Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#782
post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not both? They aren't mutually exclusive.

You're probably right. More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation. I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.

Good regulation can be a great answer to problems (and not just anti-trust). Bad regulation is... well, not a good solution of course.

For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook and other online services that I don't want to lose. I wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)

You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest; "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good regulation.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of th…

> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar. Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have…

This is kinda what I do. I personally really enjoy Gmail and don't find any competitor can match it, especially since I use a catch-all domain and really value having Gmail's spam filtering in place. However I use my own domain and have all my email forwarded to Gmail. If I ever get locked out of my Gmail account I can just switch where my email is going and be good to go.

I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#784

It does seem like there should be some laws around the appeal process. Right now the only hope some of these devs have is to make it to the frontpage of some newspapers/hnews etc

Which it always does for name-brand businesses since it's basically free clicks for news publications.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of th…

> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar. Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have…

>... your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).

I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?

My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25940240

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#786
post #723

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly Email is not the point of discussion here, as no one is building a business around it. It's Android with its app ecosystem, stadia, YouTube etc. Do you not see any problem with having effectively no support for these services?

Why is Google forced to provide customer support* for something they provide for free? * they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better

You pay with your PI which they market to advertisers to be able to target you with personalized advertising. They use your data to train their AI and build better algorithms which you are not getting payed for. Instead they offer you some free services.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#787

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 v…

“we have no choice [...] we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al.”

I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#788

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 v…

No! 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 does…

I think your critiques of regulation are fair, but I think regulation and competition are closer together than your post suggests.

>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.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#789
post #779

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complaining about "regulation" in general is as insightful as complaining about code in general, and for pretty much the same reasons. > What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation". If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?

Enforce existing law. You remember the last several times that a person/alt-service was permabanned across multiple platforms in a period of time so short that it looked coordinated? It looked that way because it was. That kind of coordinated gatekeeping should have drawn heavy scrutiny, but it didn't - for obvious reasons.

> It looked that way because it was.

Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things, especially when reporters are calling for comment on a specific act.

If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick, even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide it.

Re: Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked

#790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember someone had a post here a couple years back: - They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of th…

> Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar. Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have…

> I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).

I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.

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