> We need legislation forcing companies to manually review algorithmic decisions that impact people's lives, and have a proper appeals process.
I don't think this is enforceable nor I think it's even possible to have such legislature.
At the end of the day Google has every right to decide what they put and what they don't put on their store, with whom they do business and with whom they don't.
> With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such.
Calling an online application store an utility seems quite a stretch.
De-googling and de-duopoling is the answer to these situations. At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.
Apps are effectively utilities today. Apps have replaced taxis and phones. Order food through an app. Transfer money and buy things through apps. Find jobs and work those jobs through apps. Pay parking with apps. A lot of the developing world don't have a web app for certain things.
Refusing to have say, Telegram, on your app store is similar to not allowing a telco to operate. Also as much as I dislike Meta, if Apple/Google decided to remove WhatsApp/Instagram/Facebook, that would disrupt a lot of lives. Many businesses heavily rely on WhatsApp, more than they'd rely on landlines in the past.
> De-googling and de-duopoling is the answer to these situations. At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.
Eh, just de-googling is probably enough. This isn't really a walled garden problem, this is mostly a Google problem. Apple can do stupid things, for sure, but you can reach a human there. And they definitely don't have the same Google algorithmic "scorched earth" account banning style.
It's unfortunate this comment was grayed out so quickly and I hope that changes.
The sentiment is basically correct. Enforcing a ban on stores being able to control who they do business with is a radical break with all precedent and violates freedom of association. All stores have always had the ability to kick out any buyer or seller for any reason whatsoever short of systematic discrimination against specific protected minorities. Whether or not any particular seller thinks this is a morally optimal situation or bad for their personal business isn't going to change the centuries of history behind this.
The actual problem here isn't the arbitrariness with which Google bans sellers or the false positive rate of their decision-making process. The problem is the device vendor, OS vendor, and app store vendor are all the same company, and there are, practically speaking, only two options for the entire mobile market. Solving this is basic antitrust enforcement. Force competition for app distribution platforms. At least Android allows you to sideload and has F-Droid, but the situation is still anticompetitive and bad for both consumers and sellers.
And yes, with all respect to mobile app developers, access to a selling platform is not a utility. You don't need to be an Android developer to meet the basic necessities of life. It doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't do anything to make the situation better, but this drive to call everything a utility is not helping.
Companies originally were given charters by the government, and limited liability for their owners, in order to perform a public good. Over time that "public good" part seems to have been completely forgotten about.
So now do we say that companies have the innate right to make profit without any regard for the public good? That profits are more important than what voters in a democracy want?
> At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.
Correct. AdSense worked the exact same way on YouTube. They are just doing the same thing with apps on their platform so really nothing has changed here.
These companies can do business with whoever they want to. You can criticise them, scream at them, protest, etc but they will never change, unless you split them all up.
This is actually the real solution IMO. Instead of playing whack-a-mole with endless stream of various abuses across all the bad business practices they do, these giants should not be able to exist in their current size and scope.
The fact Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Disney, Verizon, and others [1], etc are even allowed to exist in their current forms is absolutely bonkers to me. The outsized roles
and influence they have on the economy and their individual markets just highlights that the government is incompetent or willfully corrupt.
[1]: Just a random selection of giants I can think of in a split second. But there are tons of other companies that dominate other less-sexy markets that should absolutely broken up.
Is that their fault? There's other operating systems one can install on mobile, they can even argue Android is open source and no one is stopping you from installing a different OS on your phone.
A couple of years ago, the New York Times ran an interesting article where someone tried to live an ordinary day without interacting in any way with Google. The result was that it simply wasn't possible.
I don't think this is enforceable nor I think it's even possible to have such legislature.
At the end of the day Google has every right to decide what they put and what they don't put on their store, with whom they do business and with whom they don't.
> With how much our modern lives are dependent on services like Google's, they effectively become utilities and should be regulated as such.
Calling an online application store an utility seems quite a stretch.
De-googling and de-duopoling is the answer to these situations. At the end of the day you can't force Google or Apple to have your products on their shop.