I previously worked in fraud/risk at a major ecommerce platform. On my biggest day I closed 60,000 accounts. In one day. I knew other agents who'd done 10x that.

The scale of this work is unfathomable to those who have only been on the consumer side of it.

#1 is doable but would destroy our ability to combat fraud. "Here's how not to get banned next time" is not an email anyone in this space would consider sending.

#2 is simply impossible. Fraudsters consume every available resource you can put into the appeals process. This is their full time job, they can afford to call repeatedly, all day long, until they find an agent they can trick. Regular users won't benefit.

#3 is what small claims court is already for. We should make this easier, I agree.

Usually I'm not a big fan of legislation, but in this case I completely agree. Companies unilaterally taking away anything you've paid for is effectively no different from theft, and ToS shouldn't be able to escape that. Or even if it's a free service but it's something you've built up value in -- a history of photos, messages, emails, etc. -- it's similarly effectively theft.

I agree there absolutely needs to be a form a habeus corpus here with arbitration to hear from both sides. And what's more, even when an account gets shut down, an export of all data must be provided, and a full refund of the purchase price of any digital licenses/credits still active. So even if a spammer takes over your account and Megacorp isn't convinced it wasn't you yourself that decided to spam, you still don't lose your data or money spent -- it's ultimately just a (very big) inconvenience.

The real real problem are shameless shitheads that will abuse anything to any length the run scams or malware distributions.

"Yes support tech, please understand my child just died of cancer and my wife in a car accident last week and the only pictures I have of them are on my [email protected] account!"

Google probably also bans thousands of accounts a day. And suddenly every single one of them needs a full human appeal review. Because jamming up the system is (short term) beneficial to these shitheads.

> We should impose, by law, the following rules on all companies that offer accounts to their customers.

When the services that a company provides gets to this level, it starts becoming like a public utility. If it's not possible to participate in society without using such a service, then the services should be governed like utilities are.

I wouldn't be opposed to having actual government-provided services for things like e-mail, text message, and discussion forums at a very basic level. Then (in the US anyway) we could apply the government restrictions on privacy and freedom of speech, with laws governing the oversight and implementation. Of course there would be major details to work out to prevent misuse, corruption, etc.; but it could solve the problem of losing your essential on-line identity -- as long as the government has any interest in you at all for something like expecting you to be able to send/receive an e-mail in order to pay your taxes, then they wouldn't ever cancel your account. 3rd-party services would still be possible, but then they could do whatever their business model supports, and caveat emptor. How people can expect businesses services like Facebook to comply with their personal expectation of free speech is beyond me.

> If they block/ban/close/suspend a customer account they must provide habeas corpus.

* evidence

"Habeas corpus" is not a lofty expression for evidence, although people sometimes use it as such. It's a procedure for challenging one's detention before a court.

You might enjoy https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/

It has a REALLY good section about why customer service is very hard to get right

This legislation has high costs and while it seems fair to impose them on the Apples and Googles of the world, this gets weirder with smaller services that might have trouble complying. My podcast player, Overcast (overcast.fm), is one guy. Should he be subject to this? It seems like that business might not be able to exist if he was.

You could do a revenue threshold or something but seems tricky.

Apple actually does have pretty good support for this sort of case. I went wrong. Here is that the account was in a state where support even high-level Support was not authorized to unlock it.

I have personal experience here. I was gifted a meaningful chunk of Apple gift cards. I redeemed them to a secondary Apple ID as this ID is rarely used. It got locked when I tried to spend the Apple gift cards.

It took a couple tries over a few weeks, but Apple support were very helpful and able to unlock the account. Where I must've got lucky is the automated system must've allowed the Support to take this action and it sounds like in the case here whatever fraud flag triggered issued to far more severe response.

My case I should add the gift cards were totally valid. It just was rarely used to count. That might explain why it was easier to resolve in any event. They absolutely as human support. The real issue is when human support can't overrule the computer.

I'm flabbergasted by #3. Where in the world is there no small claims court exactly like you describe? I'm genuinely curious.

This does not scale, the amount of abuse is huuuuge. But I think with a prerequisite, it could:

Companies should be required to provide access to a service that verifies identity. I know such companies exist, so it is doable. And then, once it is provable that they are dealing with an actual human who can be identified, your rules can be applied.

I pay Microsoft all of eur 11.20/month for basic office subscription and the 3 times I've clicked contact support I got called by helpful people who resolved my problem.

I guess that's one reason enterprises like them

And also it would be good to limit the ban duration with a law. For example manslaughter can be 5 years in prison. So if google decide to ban your account because you send your doctor a photo of your son for medical purposes, they are not allowed to ban you for more than 5 years and then they must restore full access to your account.

> The real problem is that companies do not offer any accessible, powerful, and intelligent customer support.

No, the real problem is that we have no reasonable alternatives when companies misbehave. There is no meaningful way to exist in society today without an Apple or Google account, and that's actually insane. It's doubly insane for people who aren't citizens of the United States (although the CCP addressed this by requiring Apple make a separate iCloud for them).

The solution isn't to legislate a right to a bank account, it's to preserve the usefulness of cash so banks don't get too far out of line.

If Google bans 100,000 bot accounts a day, and even 1% of those "users" request a human appeal, you are demanding 1,000 hearings every 24 hours. Who pays for this? Magic? If the cost of providing a "free" email account includes the potential for a $500 human-led legal adjudication, free accounts will simply cease to exist.

Further, the current court system is already backlogged by months or years for serious crimes and property disputes. You are suggesting we socialize the cost of private customer service disputes. Why should taxpayers fund a judge to decide if a "common sense" decision was made about someone's banned World of Warcraft account?!

I'm sorry but this idea is very obviously not congruent with reality as we know it, as nice as it may sound.

But then how can IP companies like Google leverage zero marginal cost of production to achieve infinite scale? Customer support costs scale linearly with the size of the customer base!

Won't somebody please think of the shareholders?

Rather than crafting a bunch of specific legislation, I say remove the carve out for arbitration. Open the doors to take them to small claims. If they don't show up (maybe because a $500/hr lawyer isn't worth it) you get a default judgement, which you eventually convert to cash. Problem solved, without adding more bloat to existing laws.

I see no reason enormous companies should carve out exceptions to the legal system. You exchange money with them, that's commerce, it's a contract. This is exactly what civil court was designed for.

Their customer support is to sue them. Few are willing to dare. But I suspect if you sued Apple over the gift card incident in a European country, the judge would side with you because of stronger consumer protection laws. Also that clause in the ToS that says you won't sue them is legally meaningless.

If this happens more than a few times, they will quickly remember why customer support is necessary.

Some of this sounds appealing to me, but I wonder how wise it is. I've been banned unfairly, and it would be fun to try to stick it to those who have... but then there's almost surely someone here on HN wanting to start some online game or something who would not be able to afford to comply with the law. He's just completely cockblocked by the barrier to entry.

If you try to make carveouts for him, they will still be absurdly restrictive and the carveouts will be abused by the likes of Reddit.

#2 doesn't scale. If you guarantee access to a human, the system will absolutely be effectively DoS'd by scammers trying to social engineer their way into access to someone's account.