[LockeWatts]

This seems self contradictory. One of the government's jobs is consumer protection and regulation. If support is deemed to be a required thing, why shouldn't it fall under that scope?

This just seems like the normal knee jerk reaction from the right half of the political spectrum that says all regulation is bad.

[6d0debc071]

If you start asking for customer support as part of regulation, you massively raise the entrance costs for other companies.

[smacktoward]

This is an easy problem to avoid: just have the regulation only kick in when you bring in a certain amount of revenue.

PayPal did $1.5 billion in revenues in Q1 2013. So you could draw a line at $1bn/year, say, which would be more than high enough to leave out any reasonable definition of a "startup" while still covering established market leaders.

[6d0debc071]

It's an easy problem to talk about avoiding, sure. We can see an obvious failure mode, so we just won't do that. But it won't be you doing it in the first place, you won't have that sort of authority. You've got to think what sort of person's going to be giving you what you ask for, what sort of terms they're likely to impose.

The person doing it won't always have an incentive to avoid the same things that you or I might think of as undesirable. The last thing you want to do is to ask for something, be one of a selection of competing viewpoints on it, and then get the Cthulhu version imposed on you.

Can you get rules that make sense out of a system? Sure. But the tendency is that you won't - at least not without a threat that forces a uniformity of interest upon the system.

[smacktoward]

You're assuming that "the system" is something that has no inputs to affect the behavior of "the person doing it". Which is wrong. There are plenty of points in the rulemaking process (see https://www.federalregister.gov/uploads/2011/01/the_rulemaki...) where those in the startup community could ask for a more targeted rule, if such a rule were being considered. And given how no politician wants to be tagged as being against job creation at the moment, I have to think it'd be an easy sell to convince them that a more narrowly targeted rule would be in everybody's best interest.

"The system" doesn't need to have "uniformity of interest" in order to make sensible things come out of it; you just need to be willing to make your voice heard within it, and to accept that you may have to compromise a bit from your ideal outcome in order to get other interests to come along.

[AnIrishDuck]

x100. Plus, I'll believe the government can regulate good customer service into companies the day I don't dread going to the DMV.

[mhb]

You may disagree, but it's not self contradictory to think that it's not the government's role to regulate business in this way.

[cookiecaper]

I don't see much about consumer protection in the Constitution, the definitive document of the "government's jobs".

It doesn't mean that there isn't some authority there, but it's silly to act like there is a mandate so explicit that we can legislate things like "make your customers happy within 48 hours of initial contact or the American people will exert physical force against you", which is essentially what people ask for when they say that Google doesn't offer "adequate" service. The proposed laws may not say that verbatim, but that's the idea they'll attempt to convey in typically myopic, broken, unworkable legalese, and to which all companies in the U.S. will have to adhere.

I believe there is a reasonable case for governmental standards and penalties relative to things like food or building safety, but "you must have X customer service agents per customer accessible by phone at least 12 hours per day once you reach $100k in revenue", or whatever, is really pushing it. Why do we believe it's reasonable to get the government involved in such minor, everyday living things? We like what Google gives us, but don't like something about the way it's implemented, so instead of working within the market we go whine to our legislators and ask them to force Google to do what we want? The fact that anyone even considers that does not bode well for the future of capitalism.

[mrtron]

Look at MySQL as an example of regulation not being for support.