Google banned me from Google Voice

While people like to scream and lose their mind about who the president is and what they're blathering on about today it's this situation that I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention. This situation impacts the average person and has the potential to impact the average person more than who the president is at any given time. Because at least with governmental politics there is actual recourse.

Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen. Unfortunately until it happens to you nobody seems to care. Often times the person that happens to gets blamed because their actions definitely must have caused this.

This would actually be a fairly simple thing for the FTC to correct if they wanted to. They're already empowered to do this kind of stuff and wouldn't need any new powers granted to them. They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service. Because when you're the size of Google you effectively are a monopolistic common carrier. So being able to say something like we can do this at any time for any reason is not appropriate at that scale. Because denying you access to phone service is denying you access to a basic utility.

It would actually be interesting to see state boards of utilities begin to pull things like this under their control. This would give enormous consumer rights to people. Because while your landline carrier can deny you service and remove your service they must have very strict documented reasons for that and there is an actual transparent appeal process as part of it. Filing an appeal and not being able to be part of the appealed discussion is not an appeal at all.

The author should consider himself lucky. Just one google service has been suspended. I got my account banned for no reason and lost access to more than 10 years worth of emails, documents, single sign ons to different apps, etc.

Only invoking GDPR and the ownership of a domain name allowed me to regain access and restore email service. Without GDPR I would've got nothing at all.

I'm the first to dogpile on the Democrats in a lot of areas but I feel they have done very well with the FTC in the past 4 years and it is a shame they did not do a good job at highlighting their accomplishments. This short-lived era of attempting to hold corporations accountable is likely done though now that Republicans are in complete control.

Actually who you vote for determines this a great deal. A democratic president actually brought some bite back to the FTC.

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2024/10/02/biden-ftc-antitrust-...

I have been using Google voice for 10+ years, and it's always been something that concerns me. I've been worried about Google either banning me or dropping the service. Does anyone know of a good alternative, I'm happy to pay for something but the main thing is it needs to be able to work from the browser like Google voice.