Indeed. I think that if a person cannot participate in modern society without being a customer with only a few competitors to choose from, then such businesses should have a "universal service obligation" and not be allowed to refuse service without a good reason. Such a reason should be mediated by the legal system.
For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.
Suing isn't as useful as you'd expect. It costs $10,000's and months to even get to court.
Criminal liability for improper bans, and allowing citizens to directly charge the company with the crime (some states do this) would probably be more practical.
Alternatively, some variant of streamlined court (similar to small-claims court) could be established, where you could automatically use the court if the defendant had already been sued more than 10 times in the last decade for the last thing. The court would provide some sort of legal or financial resources to allow the customers to quickly sue without paying out of pocket, or spending much of their own time.
This could be solved with something like CFPB, but with the Chevron Deference repealed, courts are pretty much the only remedy now for anything until congress decides to write much more specific and in-depth laws.
The Digital Markets Act and/or Digital Services Act ought to have something to say about this, especially the "this secret decision is final and we refuse to say anything else" part of the story.
That wording sounds like the decision was made in Israel and not the US.
I would guess the shutdown requests came from Israeli security services. Thus it is final and not appealable and can also the reasoning can not be revealed.
Microsoft have to choose whether to operate in the EU. There's been a long struggle between conflicting rules of US unaccountable intelligence access vs. EU privacy law ("safe harbour") that is relevant here. https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2015/10/06/a-messa...
Honestly, the day may come when some US corporations decide operating in the EU is more trouble than it's worth. I don't really expect that--it's a big market--but it could happen.
The combined armies of every member state of the EU, if it came to that.
Well before that point, they can just go through a normal court process because the EU has been empowered by the governments of each member state to write such legislation.
The decision might just as well have been taken place on the moon, laws such as DSA, DMA, and GDPR tend to protect the resident and rarely cares where a decision affecting that resident was taken.
It's worse than that - they're gradually becoming a new form of governance - and one that you can't vote out.
The term "Facebook Jail" might be coined jokingly (and the consequences of being there are pretty trivial) but the mere existence of the term is a tacit acceptance of the idea of judicial oversight by a private corporation.
Yes, you can choose not to engage with meta or its products, or (less easily) Microsoft or Google - but we're close to the point where refusing to use the products of (and thus be defacto-governed by) one of the tech giants will have implications beyond self-imposed inconvenience.
Already you'll be excluded from a significant proportion of social plans if you don't have either WhatsApp or Messenger.
I used to disagree with this. Recent conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine (regardless of who you side with) made me change my mind.
How is it that some rich Californian CEO with their own bias and agenda can decide to shut off service to entire groups of people in an active war zone? These decisions could cost people their lives! That's insane.
>The real solution here is to use Signal (or something like it).
The article discusses that they are unable to contact their family over the internet because Israel is shutting off internet. So they were using Skypes Skype to Phone service to call their family's mobile phones over normal cell service in Gaza.
To be able to come up with a solution you’d first need to be aware of a problem, which in many such cases you wouldn’t be, until one day you are banned and lose all your accounts, and solutions in hindsight won’t help with that.
There should be market share limits on providing identity and currency, or those should just be handled to the government (like they used to be).
Similarly, big vertically integrated computing platforms should be broken up (in-house applications should have exactly the same access to APIs documentation, support, etc, as third party ones).
I don't see the harm for start ups to think about their user's rights early on. Better it becomes part of their Startup DNA than having to learn it later and adopt their company.
Not at all, smaller players would be exempt. Only if the service becomes massive enough and starts to police their users with secret courts in this way do they get treated like a utility.
Yesterday we had the discussion on FCC rules, and CE marking, from which small players are not exempt. There's no reason to assume there would be de minimis exemptions, there aren't for the GDPR.
For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.
And the same for online businesses.