That lead me to wonder: Could Google's customers form some sort of union and attempt to hold discussions with Google?
On the one hand I think it would in Google's interests to do everything to prevent having another party to have to negotiate with. On the other hand, if there was a union of customers and they occasionally demanded something everyone thinks is reasonable in the press, that may start something. Especially if Google caves on some of these issues.
What do you think?
Its great that some American Google workers have decided to unionise (in practice, a significant proportion of their EU staff will already be unionised), and they are right to point to ethical issues as the reason for doing so. In the medium term, we are going to see some sort of professional regulation in software engineering, if for no other reason than to ensure that Terminator and Black Mirror don't become a reality.
The situation with customers and users is different. They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere. The best way that we can keep Google decent is by ensuring that competing services can emerge. Unionising customers/users would actually make them more invested in Google which would be self-defeating.
For the search engine (e.g. not GSuite), Google's customers are actually the advertisers and not the users. This is not meant to be a cynical take but just stating financial reality. The advertisers are the ones paying billions into Google's revenue to maintain the expensive data centers and host petabytes of disk space for Youtube videos. Because money flows from advertisers to Google, the advertisers are the ones that caused Adpocalypse[1].
The websurfers querying the search engine are users or consumers and not the paying customers. Not sure how a users' union would have much leverage since they don't pay. If they're unhappy, they can use another search engine (e.g. Bing) or influence indirectly (e.g. boycott advertisers which causes Adpocalypse.)
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube+advertisers+adpocaly...
That doesn't mean they don't exist in the US. They do. For instance Consumer Watchdog. [3] This group does critically look at business practices and models of big tech. [4]
Another example would be the Consumer Federation of America. [5] This organization is an umbrella that federates plenty of local and regional consumer groups. [6] The CFA also does a ton of lobbying with the FCC and other departments. [7]
Those are the more "generic" consumer groups. Looking at specific "consumer groups" that lobby on behalf of technology consumers, the most visible organization would be the Electronic Frontier Foundation. [8]
If you want "discussions with Google" in the most broad terms. That's what Congress and the EU Commission have been doing with their string of hearings last year. Both public bodies are still build on the idea that they represent millions of people through the vote. If consumers want to engage in a discussion with a multi-billion dollar industry on equal footing, public hearings and investigations would be how that goes down.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_organization#United_S... [2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-google-privacy/europea... [3] https://consumerwatchdog.org [4] https://consumerwatchdog.org/privacy-technology [5] https://consumerfed.org/ [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_Federation_of_America [7] https://consumerfed.org/issues/communications/ [8] https://www.eff.org/
google can very well ignore a union of consumers. The most they can do is stop using the services in sync, and arguably the fact that they're trying to organise a consumer union rather than take their business elsewhere is a red flag that they'll find it difficult to do so.
To put it another way, assuming that the sum of all workers is as important as the sum of all consumers, there are ~150k google employees and ~4.5 billion consumers. since these numbers are several orders of magnitude apart, to have a real effect you'd need about 10k members of a consumer union to have the equivalent force of a worker union with a single member.
First question would be: how big would this union need to be to make Google do/not do things?
Second question would be: emphasising that it takes away power from the individual (or in your idea's case, the individual Google customer), who would sign up to that?
What I could see is another company forming that resells Google Cloud, and gets better discounts and better representation because of it. Normal market stuff.
I can see Apple developers starting a union too.
Basically anything that's a platform where people make money could rightfully have a union.
You don't have to rely on existing assumptions about unions, or customers vs user, or many other concerns I see raised in other replies. The fundamental thing you're trying to do is influence decision makers and a large group of people is certainly one way to do that.
The effectiveness of such a group will come down to factors such as how well you manage message, what access you can get, and what degree (and from how many angles) you can apply pressure and persuasion.
If nothing else starting a place where Google users can collect, vote on, and discuss their top priorities could form the basis of discovering how large a group you can attract, where the passion exists, and what resources you can muster toward the effort.
Ultimately, this fizzled out (just like StudiVZ after its acquisition and subsequent demise vs Facebook), but I still believe there is merit to the idea.
I find it unlikely that there's any issue that cuts across all of Google's customers (advertisers, publishers, cloud users, gsuite users, etc), so a Google Customers Union probably does not make sense.
A customer union would have to be able to credibly threaten: all our members will stop using your products until you agree to our demands.
It’s hard to imagine enough G customers doing this. The customers who care enough about privacy to take simple steps like using DDG and installing ad blockers, aren’t a big source of revenue for G anyway.
I suspect the same would be the case with a users union: nobody would join because why would they. Complaining and getting outraged about google being evil is fun, but changing it requires effort.
You'll never get anything vaguely resembling a large enough percentage of Google's customers to matter to care about the issues at all.
I know that sounds dismissive, but if you step outside the "people who know and care about tech and privacy" bubble for a minute, it's plain as day. The overwhelming majority of people just don't care.
If anything, they like seeing more pertinent ads. They like that the Google Assistant tells them when there's traffic on their route and they need to leave early. They like the results, and they don't even realize there is a cost, much less one that should matter to them.
A large enough group of people directly switching as members and influencing others to do the same can work to keep a company in line. It'd be unique and awesome.
Practically, the hard power any such organization is going to have would start with their spending dollars (and possibly their signal... A lot of Google's "special sauce" is big data from big usage, and if usage goes down, software quality suffers). Google would (and does) listen to a significant percentage of their dollars-base saying "Change this or I'm taking my ads to Facebook and my infrastructure to AWS." They may perhaps listen to a significant percentage of their user-behavior-base saying "Change this or I'm using Bing," though it'd have to be a hell of a large organization to make a dent.
First time I read the term, and online searching doesn't give me relevant results.
Kind of surprised similar groups haven't appeared for AWS, Google, and Azure customers*.
* edit: I mean customers, people paying hard cash. Users relying on free services need to figure out some form of leverage and band together behind that.
[1]http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/data-as-labor/ [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKEL7I03vrg
Why is it needed?
What enforcement would there be, if the search engine were not performing to the union's expectations and needs?
Good old fashioned competition has usually been the way people deal with a service or product they didn't find satisfactory. Try DuckDuckGo, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Baidu. Vote with your feet.
I still think Google is the best general search engine out there, but DDG is my daily driver because it's good enough and provides a bit more privacy (or so I imagine).
* You are renting an apartment from a huge company. The company changes a policy. There is no way for you to unionize with your neighbors to fight that.
Ditto for trying to fight any big corp like Comcast, ATT, etc.
Our powers are diluted whereas the big forms have warchests that a single individual can never match.
A govt was supposed to do this but it is not working.
Doesn't mean that we wait for the govt. The time is now and we must act otherwise these but companies will keep running and ruining the planet.
But as others have pointed out, you really just created a government or a consumer group, and the creation and maintenance of that group is a non-trivial challenge by itself.
Too many Google customers gets wronged without the ability to get reparation or to talk to an actual person, and considering the size of Google that is unacceptable with the impact they have on everybody's lives.
It's a group I founded that is focused on researching and regulating Google's search monopoly. Google has abused its power and many, many users of Google know it. There wasn't really a place or group that can give voice to that anger though so I created the club. As others have pointed out, we aren't Google's customers, we are just users of their software, the advertisers are their customers. I don't think we have enough power as just users to be able to get to a point where we can negotiate with Google directly and issue demands and extract concessions. The power that we do have, as workers within the tech industry who understand what Google is doing, is talking with regulators and showing them how and why they should regulate Google. I've found regulators to be extremely receptive and grateful for the research I have provided them (i.e. https://knuckleheads.club/2020/10/07/we-crawled-our-way-into...). Many of these regulators have the same general complaints we do and want to dethrone Google from being king of the internet. I support the Alphabet Workers Union and am super happy to see it exist and I am working hard to establish the club as a way for people working outside Google to make changes to how Google behaves.
That's what governments are for, Google must change the way they do "business" (unlikely) AND still be broken up. The exact same for other tech behemoths.
That's not gonna happen however, they already own everything including government and public opinion.
I am - or rather my business is a paying Google customer and I would welcome this.
Still, it’s private enterprise. If public exposure doesn’t work on certain issues, I think some kind of regulation is ultimately required.
A customers union? Are you fucking kidding me? How much anti-consumer shit does a company have to do before you’ll realise they’re not in business to serve your needs, they’re in business to serve you ads.
You do not need a union, you need to move on. Let Google fail if they can't figure it out.
The purpose of this smart contract could be even more general purpose than that, in being structured as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), with accounts voting to decide what the accounts will collectively do.
For instance: I commit to not buying Starbucks for 90 days in order to support a mandate that they reduce their plastic usage 20%.
Or, I will not pay for UFC PPVs for 6 months to protest Dana White's support of Donald Trump.
It'd be nice to quantify resistance to corporate endeavors on a populist level. Of course, given current social circumstances, it would be hard to keep it civil.
The first thing to notice is that the calculus of unionization or collective action is very different than what we historically know. As a user, whether you see yourself as a customer or a laborer vis-a-vis Google, in both cases your position is different than traditional customers or laborers. The importance of convenience for all your transactions is much bigger. We probably aren't willing to spend an hour a week going to union meetings, because Google isn't as significant to us (as users) as a traditional employer, and because we have a similar relationship to a variety of other companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, etc.) as to Google, which would by analogy thereby entail a lot of time.
Moreover, it is much harder to build a social relationship with people in similar positions. At a job, or at a checkout line, you meet people in the same place as you. With a Google service, it's just doesn't happen naturally that you encounter people (and can easily and spontaneously communicate with people) in the same position as you (even though there are likely so many more). The companies themselves control how you inhabit their "space" - whether you can "meet" other people in the relevant way currently depends, for instance, on whether there is a chat or forum connecting you to those people. And of course, relying on their graciousness for that space is not going to go down well most of the time [1] as soon as this collective organization starts becoming significant. (This sort of control of how social interactions take place has been compared to the British enclosures.)
There are probably a number of valuable ways to collectively organize in this space. But the above considerations, and the fact that our own skills (and hence ability to contribute) are in programming and design, led a few friends and I to an idea: that we could create those spaces for collective organization via browser extensions and phone apps. The idea is that you install a browser extension (we haven't started on the app), and join one or more unions (or campaigns). The browser extension, based on the policy files of the unions you've joined, can a) block the website for some period of time for all its members, with some message; or b) display a banner when a member visits a site. The union members discuss and decide what the policy will look like. From there you can organize boycotts and make demands.
(https://izens.net/ (and the browser extension) is still in it's early phases, so feedback is much appreciated!)
[0] I agree that it may be misleading to think of it as a consumer union in most cases, for reasons other people have mentioned. On the other hand, the Posner & Weyl idea that we are data laborers suggests it might be a labor union. Ultimately, none of this matters much to the broader points.
[1] Compare this to moving out of WhatsApp, which I'm in the process of doing. I can use WhatsApp itself to get in touch with the people I want to coordinate with, thus making that coordinating relevant and timely.
Shameless self-promotion: I've speculated in the past that software can help here, eg, by hooking into corporate account APIs to trigger automatic mass cancellation of orders. That's one of the examples of potential "transformative legal technology" in this (sadly paywalled, sorry) academic article: https://utpjournals.press/doi/abs/10.3138/utlj.2017-0047
The way they worked is people would vote for representatives that help make decisions that were in the interests of people, and this would reign in the power of extremely large and powerful companies.
In some parts of Europe they still have these.
Unfortunately in the US companies were foolishly permitted to both purchase the voting power of representatives and directly influence the will of the people to render the government virtually useless (though still a useful distraction for the people)
(1) my first gmail address, opened when i was 10, forwards messages to my current gmail, but both recovery emails are for a domain my dad no longer owns and the last passwords i remember are no longer valid. i answer enough security questions to make them say 'let us look at it' but my hopes are not high...