[eru]

> Maybe we made the wrong call across the board, and lower-productivity, but far higher trust commerce is the way to go... but a lot of that commerce is losing in the market, right now.

Plenty of people in the comments here want to enforce that approach via laws and regulation..

> So if we like it, we have to be willing to pay extra for it.

.. and I wonder if they are taking this into account.

[whatshisface]

In the same way that nobody knows which milk bottles are full of chalk, nobody knows enough about the hundreds of businesses they interact with on a daily basis to TOS comparison-shop. The understanding of what Google could do to your online life by closing your Gmail account is near to nonexistent in the consumer population.

[eru]

> In the same way that nobody knows which milk bottles are full of chalk, nobody knows enough about the hundreds of businesses they interact with on a daily basis to TOS comparison-shop.

That's what brands and reputation are for. And it works: brands often do command a premium.

[whatshisface]

It didn't work for milk bottles that's why I used it as an example.

[eru]

Interestingly, it's working for milk in China.

(Mainland) China has regulations for milk. Including banning of chalk. Alas, those regulations aren't enforced with much teeth in practice, so consumers rely on reputation and brands. Specifically, they buy milks from oversees, like Australia, because of their superior reputation.

A big part of that reputation is that Australian companies won't be protected by the Chinese government when they screw up. So it's harder for them to hide blemishes on their reputation (at least to hide them from Chinese customers).