Thanks HN: Lessons learned after Google nearly killed my site

> I'm really curious what you mean here. Banks(here in UK) are stupidly competitve, there's constant offers and incentives to switch, I cannot imagine anyone in this country thinking "oh I would switch but they can't close my account so I won't".

How competitive a market in is fundamentally a question of how hard it is to switch. So probably the most uncompetitive market in the world is iOS app distribution. Because if you don't want to use Apple to distribute your iOS app, you not only have to create your own app store, then you have to create your own OS, and hardware competitive with Apple's, and convince enough other developers to use your store that it can attract users, and then attract all of the users.

A great metric for how uncompetitive a market is would be how much profit the incumbent makes, and you'll notice that Apple as at the top of the market cap list. Because otherwise price competition would drive down margins. But you'll notice that banks are not exactly scraping by either.

Because switching costs are high there too. You want to switch banks? Go fill out HR paperwork at work to change your direct deposit to the new bank, otherwise the new bank charges a monthly fee. But wait, now the old bank charges a monthly fee without it, so you need to get everything else switched right away.

Everything else is quite a list. Every separate business you have recurring payments set up with. Mortgage lender, student loans, power company, water company, cable company, wireless company, car insurance, homeowners insurance etc. etc. You're going to be screwing with this for hours, might as well stick with the existing bank unless they're actively in the process of murdering your dog.

And then they don't have to compete with each other on the metrics that really matter. Notice that it's all up-front switching gimmicks and introductory rates, because once they've got you, you're stuck.

> Are you familiar with a small company known as PayPal? Where they can lock your account for 6 months without providing any reason whatsoever and you don't have access to your funds? You can't dismiss a real issue by just saying "it should be obvious". Sure, it's obvious but the only way we stop this from happening is through regulation.

And this is a failure of both regulation and competition. It's just another example of regulation without competition being insufficient.

Notice that competition could solve this, if it was present. But the switching cost for a merchant is even higher than it is for a buyer. You have to get all of your own customers to switch to a different payment provider, of which there are many more than your typical individual has utility bills, and with no guarantee that they would all even be willing to switch.

The primary goal of regulation should be to create a higher level of competition than this, because once you have that, the competition itself solves >99% of other problems.

How long do you think Paypal would be arbitrarily freezing accounts if it was trivially easy to move all of a merchant's own customers to a different payment processor, so that the first time Paypal froze a customer's money they lost two thirds of their merchants to a competitor?

Example of a regulation that would actually help in banking, because it would increase competition: Bank account routing number portability, so that if you move to another bank, you can keep your routing number and all of your recurring payments still work against the new account.

Or for Paypal, a standardized public vendor-agnostic money transfer API, so that vendors and buyers don't have to use the same payment processor and vendors can switch from one to another without their customers having to do anything.

I did too at first.

> if, say, Google steals your bike that would be purely economic damage. Surely the UK legal system would still punish that...!?

Yes, they would. This is because there is a specific Act of Parliament known as the Torts (Interference with Goods) Act 1977 which specifically addresses the tort of "trespass to goods" also known as "wrongful interference with goods".

You would need to prove that Google "deliberately" interfered with your bike, on the balance of probabilities. However, Google would have two defences:

- Consent (e.g. you trespass on to their land, and they clamp or detain your bike - you are seen as consenting to the consequences of your trespass, namely the clamping, so cannot argue wrongful interference with goods)

- Distress damage feasant (e.g. you trespass on to their land, Google is entitled to seize and detain any property you brought with you until you leave, or (if damage has been caused) until you pay for any damages).

There are no other specific defences to this tort, only general defences to a tort (such as limitation, illegality, etc.)

In your stated case, assuming you proved the tort on the balance of probabilities, you'd be entitled to damages per Section 3 of the Act.

Sounds to me like Google protected the Internet from your site after you got hacked, which alerted you to a severe security hole in your system, so what are you complaining about?

So wait — you were banned by Google, then years later banned by Facebook before even trying to run ads?

That almost sounds like they’re sharing ban lists