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by elmerfud
595 days ago
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While people like to scream and lose their mind about who the president is and what they're blathering on about today it's this situation that I never see any politician talk about in a meaningful way and I never see get attention. This situation impacts the average person and has the potential to impact the average person more than who the president is at any given time. Because at least with governmental politics there is actual recourse. Until we demand that our government begin to prioritize consumer rights against these modern-day robber barons this kind of stuff will continue to happen. Unfortunately until it happens to you nobody seems to care. Often times the person that happens to gets blamed because their actions definitely must have caused this. This would actually be a fairly simple thing for the FTC to correct if they wanted to. They're already empowered to do this kind of stuff and wouldn't need any new powers granted to them. They could simply say when an account is suspended or disabled or you are banned including a shadow ban that you must provide the specific details of what caused the ban and what specific provisions were violated in the terms of service. Because when you're the size of Google you effectively are a monopolistic common carrier. So being able to say something like we can do this at any time for any reason is not appropriate at that scale. Because denying you access to phone service is denying you access to a basic utility. It would actually be interesting to see state boards of utilities begin to pull things like this under their control. This would give enormous consumer rights to people. Because while your landline carrier can deny you service and remove your service they must have very strict documented reasons for that and there is an actual transparent appeal process as part of it. Filing an appeal and not being able to be part of the appealed discussion is not an appeal at all. |
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I grew up before number portability. Let me tell you that phone number portability is among the greatest visible government mandated boons in my lifetime (though I suspect there many other less visible ones). The fact that the user in question in this post was able to reassign his phone number at all is basically a modern anti-corporate miracle.
I don't really mean to detract from your point. Certainly much more could and should be done. But we have to acknowledge that, miraculously, more than nothing has already been done.