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by cosmie 2097 days ago
Depends on the state, but look for verbiage related to lodging a consumer complaint. Here's[1] the one for my state.

The AG office isn't necessarily writing a personalized letter, but rather forwarding your complaint and maintaining visibility into the correspondence until it's resolved.

In this case, a complaint such as "Google operates a marketplace for web browser extensions. I generate revenue through this marketplace, and have been unable to obtain the transaction records for sales made through Google's marketplace that are necessary to comply with my NY State tax obligations. Please see attached for correspondence records of my unsuccessful attempts to resolve this situation to date."

AG's office forwards that to Google's legal team, asks for a response. Technically the AG's office doesn't care how the situation gets resolved, and they're just acting to facilitate the complaint and not as your personal lawyer. But in this situation a resolution/response of "oh yea, no we can't give you those our export button is broke" _would_ be of interest to the AGs office, since it potentially means there are many NY state residents unable to comply with their tax obligations and it becomes an actual issue on their radar to look into. So instead their legal team will track down whoever the hell is responsible/capable of providing those records, hand them over with a smile, get the matter closed with the AG's office, and give you a direct point of contact for the future, so Big Brother AG doesn't have to get involved (or see) future correspondence on the matter.

Actual responses will vary depending on the complaint. But issues that are likely to impact more than just you are likely to be taken the most seriously by the company receiving the complaint, since those are the ones that could be issues the AG decides to look into "on behalf of the State" and can lead to enforcement actions/fines/etc.

[1] https://www.tn.gov/attorneygeneral/working-for-tennessee/fil...

1 comments

I generally find the only way anyone gets Google to respond to any service issue at this point is to be lucky enough that they can make it in to a tax issue so Google legal get involved or to utter (at least vaguely credibly) the magic word antitrust.

Otherwise Google effectively just bin any issues that a customer service team should fix.

Or get your issue visible on social media