How would this regulation help in this specific case?
I find I sympathise a lot with both narratives about app stores: it does seem that big mistakes are made and sometimes it seems apps are removed anti competitively but it also seems that there are a lot of apps that are basically malware already and forcing app stores to remove fewer apps would lead to more of it.
The problem is that an inherent imbalance in scale means you have no effective or proportionate recourse when Google break this law. This legislation requires meaningful human interaction with developers, but as many in this thread have observed, developers can't access a human, only automated processes.
That would be costly for Google and wouldn't easily scale, so clearly they don't choose to follow this law. Trouble is that laws are meaningless without enforcement, and someone to advance that enforcement on behalf of the smaller party.
Google makes boatloads of money, but somehow they cannot seem to implement a good people-focused review system for whether or not apps are malicious. "But that doesn't scale", I hear you say. They could simply hire more people, that scales fine. It's quite simply that Google has never been a people company and the culture has never shifted from engineering first to people first. It is a shame, because this leads to an ever more shitty experience for the humans using their stuff.
Because they have businesses that scale: dominated by fixed costs with very small unit costs, where twice as many units have very much less than twice as much total cost to deliver.
> "But that doesn't scale", I hear you say. They could simply hire more people, that scales fine.
No, it doesn't. Hiring more people with any given skill set has superlinear costs very quickly (because of supervision heirarchies and increased quantity even before that increasing the clearing price).
Cost scaling worse than linearly is pretty much what people mean when they say, “Doesn’t scale".
If you can't properly do the business, you should not be in the business.
Externalizing the costs and internalizing the profits is basically theft from society.
Other examples of externalizing costs and internalizing profits are companies like tobacco companies and drug dealers externalizing the costs of the diseases their products produce (both costs to the direct customers, their families and economy at large form lost productive capacity) while they take the profits of the addictions they produce, and fossil fuel companies externalizing the costs of destroying the climate while internalizing the profits from those dependent on the form of energy they provide.
Just because a business model 'works', for the definition of maintains a profit, does not mean that it should be allowed. For an extreme and easily understood example, if society tolerated murder, then murder-for-hire services could become quite sustainably profitable, and probably scalable (especially by applying technology to the Slaughterbot model) as many people would like to eliminate other inconvenient people. That does not mean we should allow it.
> If you can't properly do the business, you should not be in the business.
Perhaps, but “it scales” and “it ought to be required even though it does not scale” are not merely different arguments, but different classes of argument (the former factual, the latter moral/ethical.)
The question is the constraints that are applied, and they all overlap.
There is no such thing as a "free market". Every market has constraints ranging from what is physically possible (available materials, transit time, storage space, spoilage, etc.++) to market constraints (what people are interested in making or buying), market conditions (buyers' or sellers' market for what goods/services), and either implied or explicit legal and/or moral constraints.
No market is simply free other than the physical constraints. Every market expects certain standards of buyers and sellers, although those can vary wildly, but the extreme of [don't give your buyer the goods, just kill him and take his money] or [don't pay the seller, just kill him and take the goods] is not tolerated.
The question here is what standards should be required.
I also not here that writing about it, while it is not murdering people, Google is certainly taking the position that it is perfectly OK to murder a customer's business for it's own convenience. Just because that process scales does not mean it should be tolerated.
Moreover, considering the scale of Google's valuation and free cash, I have no question that they could scale up a reasonable level of service so that they are not literally in the business of killing their customers.
How does Apple manage to have human reviewers and engineers you can talk with on the phone about App Store issues? It seems like it scales just fine for them.
Do you contend that they are lying when they include this in their rejection emails:
> If you have a question about your app's review, send us a message in Resolution Center. If you would prefer to speak over the phone, just let us know in your message, and we'll schedule a call.
- you're not talking to a reviewer or engineer unless you are a high tier dev. Bulks of devs could get standard customer support just hearing their grievances out, the same way emails get canned responses.
- devs don't all get access to the same resources or attention from Apple, and your support tier will largely depend on your revenue. I wouldn't expect a long tail app to get much attention.
Interesting. This was with a minor app that has no users and no name brand. Thus I assumed it was standard. Sorry about that, maybe it's more arbitrary than I thought.
This is exactly where you need regulation. EU can force Google to to create sane policies for removal, or even fine Google when they do stuff like this.
