My personal take is that state has to mandate that systemic companies (>100M users or X $B in revenues) have to have high quality customer service at cost. It probably cost Meta $500-$2000 to adjucate hacked account case so it's unreasonable to ask company to do it for free (hackers/bots can also file those requests). I should be able to pay Meta $2000 to recover account if my business depends on it - even if it means I have to go somewhere in person to show my ID.
Wikipedia is still multi-million dollar company with lots of employees. There should be an opportunity to pay Wikipedia $1000-5000 or whatever amount is reasonable for them to verify and remove a clear case of defamation. Right now your only option is to pay editors under the table.
My experience is that you can get all your Google issues resolved if you show up to Mountain View in person and ask politely. Might a similar strategy work for Meta?
I don't actually think it's unreasonable. Meta probably earns $2,000 in a span of a few seconds. They can afford to provide users with basic services such as account recovery, that allow users to use the services under the terms that were agreed upon when the user's account was created.
Meta might make a lot of money, but the profit per user is probably quite low, and they make up for that by having billions of users. Customer support scales with the number of users, not the profit overall.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the cost (on their end) of a single customer support call to meta makes you a net financial loss for them. And how many customer support reps would they need to handle support for billions of users speaking every language on the planet? All that funded from advertising? Yikes. I suspect running a properly funded customer support line might be able to put the whole company in the red.
Small claim courts has filing fees and courts mostly pay for themselves. There is no real externalized costs other than to users who do not have reasonable way to recover their account. That's the deal with using ad supported services.
TFA is explicitly about Facebook externalising its support costs to small claims courts. If RPI was accused of the same thing, I'd feel the same way.
Anyway, as I understand it, RPI externalises support costs to retailers. I can certainly call my RPI supplier and talk to someone. Externalising commercially is totally fine, externalising to the public is up there with pollution, perhaps a kind of tragedy of the commons.
I think part of the "deal" with free services like GMail, Facebook, Whatsapp, twitter, and so on is that the services only work financially because there isn't any customer support. If you forget your password, or your account gets hijacked or something, well, you don't actually make the companies enough money to take your troubles seriously.
Arguably, this is fine so long as the customer knows in advance that that's the deal (hence the EULA). And I think the courts acting as a back stop for that is a good thing. (Though I'd want Meta to foot the bill for the court's costs if they're found to be in the wrong).
Maybe another approach would be for Meta, Google, etc to charge customers for customer support. "Hotmail is free. If anything happens and only a human can fix the problem, it'll cost you $2/minute to talk to our service reps. So we don't have weird incentives, we set the price so our call center breaks even exactly - we do not profit from having a bad service. If the problem turns out to be due to a bug on our site, at the rep's discretion they can refund the money.
You can speak to a human whenever you want, but call centers aren't free. You have to pay us to do so."
Except that because they are "free", they drive out any semblance of competition which would serve as a check on the super shitty customer service.
As an alternative solution, I'm all for splitting up Meta, Google, etc for being anti-competitive.
If Gmail, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Hotmail, etc. all had to stand on their own without being able to share revenue from other sections of the company, the "free to prevent competition" would go into the trash can where it belongs.
Account recovery is actually extremely tricky as it's very time consuming to verify that user is who he says he is. Hackers are really good at social engineering and with AI even video checks are not realiable.
The only way to make it robust is to bring it to physical life with real ID and photo/face check - that will cut out on 99.99% of abuse and impersonation attempts. The problem is that it is extremely expensive and frankly can't be funded from ad revenues.
