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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

#771

Post by heavyset_go »

eldavido wrote: post #735
jennyyang wrote: post #658

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…

There's a lack of competition because Google and other giant companies have leveraged their monopolies in certain markets, like search or mobile operating systems or mobile app distribution, to crush and prevent competition in other markets.

We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.

We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

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

#772

Post by oblio »

CivBase wrote: post #733
jennyyang wrote: post #658

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 need to politicize this issue. We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.

Trust busting is regulation...

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

#773

Post by Swizec »

sethammons wrote: post #725
shakezula wrote: post #672

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, we need better laws around customer service and data handling, absolutely. For (as far as I could ever tell) no reason, Facebook marked my account as a bot in roughly 2015 and refused to let me access any of my account data until I proof of identity. They wanted a picture of my driver's license and a picture of me to confirm. I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get v…

Why is it "intense verification?" What is a good alternative? I lost access to my blizzard account once and I had to send in my driver's license.

Because Facebook is not a government institution. My legal identity is no concern of theirs.

You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it?

(not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)

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

#774

Post by judge2020 »

esja wrote: post #760
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #734

If you've got an automated vetting process with a 99.999% success rate, but are dealing with billions of accounts, that's still tens of thousands of false positives. At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB". You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent t…

The lesson here is: you are too big. If you were smaller, you could manage these issues. But you choose to be big instead.

You can't choose to stay small unless you're someone like clubhouse which still has a long waitlist for sign-ups, and even then they're trying to build their infrastructure wide enough to accompany everyone. Not offering service to all/99.9% of potential customers is effectively lost value and goes against shareholders' expectations.

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

#775

Post by ck425 »

eldavido wrote: post #735
jennyyang wrote: post #658

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…

"Regulation" gave us the end of Slavery.

"Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.

"Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.

"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).

Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.

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

#776

Post by tjalfi »

newbie578 wrote: post #646

I just want to know why is no one willing to hold Google and Apple accountable? Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?

Asking Sundar this type of question could get your organization banned; Google has been known to do this[0].

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/

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

#777

Post by throwawaysea »

jennyyang wrote: post #658

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…

If they are so big that we need to regulate them, I would rather they either be turned into public agencies or be split up or face some other mechanism to increase competition and choice. Regulation will still be needed to some extent for data portability, but the massive centralization of power on a governmental scale should really mean that they are subject to government-level rules (the law). It doesn't make sense for example, that Twitter - bigger than almost every nation - can have a unilateral set of private laws that make our US first amendment rights virtually inaccessible because we've outsourced the town square to a private company.

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

#778

Post by falcolas »

remus wrote: post #728
falcolas wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users Who cares? No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc…

I agree with the principle, but in a world of finite resources you've got to pick your battles. The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it. It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of l…

> The reality is that there is no system in existence that's gonna work perfectly for billions of users, more so when you've got malicious actors trying to abuse the system, so you need to quantify the scale of the problem and decide how much effort you put in to fixing it.

That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't tolerate with corporations.

> apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.

Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year as well. And that money comes from its customers, whether directly or indirectly.

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

#779

Post by tal8d »

wwweston wrote: post #743
eldavido wrote: post #735

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…

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.

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

#780

Post by oblio »

iooi wrote: post #686
jennyyang wrote: post #658

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…

There are so many alternatives to email -- Outlook, Yahoo Mail, Proton, iCloud, etc. How can you argue with a straight face that Google has a monopoly on email?

You'd know if you tried to send a newsletter, for example, to 10k subscribers.

Just because unicycles exist as a means of locomotion doesn't mean that personal transportation isn't dominated by automobiles.

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