[vitus]

No offense taken!

I do wish that the market would work as intended such that failures in handling abuse (e.g. frivolous accusations as we're plausibly seeing here) would lead to organizations moving away from Zoom to competitors, whether it's Teams or Meet or BlueJeans or whatever else. But unfortunately the friction of changing platforms is high, between sunk cost of contracts, needing to vet / compare multiple new systems, training on the use of new software, etc.

Meanwhile, the existing solution mostly just works 99% of the time.

(All this said -- even if CG-NAT is to blame for multiple students showing up with the same IP address, that should be tangential to the actual identification of abuse. Either there's a process failure (students aren't required to sign in), or Zoom's not logging or looking at the right things (e.g. display name changes).)

[TomSwirly]

> I do wish that the market would work as intended

(Intended?! By whom?!)

In this case, the market is working exactly as markets are supposed to. Effectively dealing with abuse is expensive, and has no profit potential whatsoever.

The market will therefore penalize companies that spend money on dealing with abuse, and reward companies that do not. Economically, companies that manage to sweep abuse under the rug for the minimum possible cost will naturally dominate, and companies that spend the considerable investments needed to do a good job on it will eventually go to the wall.

If "market working as intended" has any meaning, maximizing profits is certainly it. It's very economically logical for a provider to not cater to the 1% or so abuse victims, who are expensive to handle, offer little revenue, and might stay with you anyway out of a lack of other places to go. It might be unfair, lack compassion, and be cruel to prioritize abusers over the abused, but none of these terms have any meaning by the metric of "markets"

[vitus]

By "markets working as intended", I mean "if one provider of a service has a critical flaw that's specific to that provider, and that flaw is a dealbreaker for some customers, then they ought to be able to vote with their wallets to switch to otherwise equivalent providers that don't have that flaw.

But I see your point that the markets are working logically from the perspective of there being insufficient incentive for companies (well, Zoom at least) to invest in dealing with this issue. Negative press only goes so far, and it doesn't matter much when it's the dominant player in the market by far (in part due to design choices that facilitated these flaws -- minimized friction in the interest of accessibility also minimizes friction for malicious action).