Ask HN: Do we need a Google Customers Union? Could it work?

[CaptainJustin]

I recently saw that some Google employees are attempting to unionize and someone mentioned that Google's customers wish they could unionize.

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?

[fergie]

Are we talking about _customers_ or _users_? They are two different things, often with competing agendas.

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.

[solarkraft]

> They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere

So can the employees, in theory. Unions exist because in reality it isn't that simple - arguably it's very similar when using it. Though I wonder how that could be dealt with through a union instead of plain old regulation.

[wackget]

> They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere

I always think this kind of "free market" thinking is spoken by people with an incredibly narrow world view.

You, personally, might be aware of all the evils and ills to which these companies subject their users, but the average consumer is blissfully ignorant or simply doesn't care.

You might be educated or enlightened enough to be aware of the risks these services pose, but again most people aren't. Is the average WhatsApp user (especially in the huge markets such as India where people are generally poorer and less highly educated) really going to care about the implications of privacy policies etc.?

Those users aren't even going to think about switching to a competing service because (e.g.) all their friends and contacts use WhatsApp.

When a company gets as big as Google, Facebook, etc. then competition starts to not matter and that's why the "free market" idea holds zero weight.

[sandworm101]

>> professional regulation in software engineering, if for no other reason than to ensure that Terminator and Black Mirror don't become a reality.

Engineers have professional associations. That never stopped a single engineer from building weapons of mass destruction. Lawyers are subject to perhaps the most intricate body of professional regulations and so lawyers rarely ever do anything that might hurt society at large. Professional organizations exist to benefit their members. They don't exist to prevent social ills. That is the role of government. A bar association for software engineers won't prevent Skynet. Government regulations setting limits on the powers attached to AI might.

[xmodem]

One customer/user going elsewhere will have no impact on Google's bottom line, though.

Getting enough people to to stop using Google products for a day - or enough creators to set their videos to private for a day, for instance - would have an impact, but sadly is probably impossible to organize on a large enough scale to be effective.

[amelius]

> They already have ultimate power over Google since they can simply go elsewhere.

This is like saying if you complain about the government you can always "simply" move to a different country.

[V-2]

The distinction between users and customers is blurry. You can be a user and, effectively, a customer even if you pay with something else than money (eg. we pay Facebook with our data).

[twobitshifter]

I would argue that they cannot effectively go elsewhere and competing services cannot emerge. The reason for this is that the Google Search index has been built over decades into a unfathomable search index that is beyond compare. If the index were made public, with a usable API, then other companies could provide alternative search experiences, however developing an on-par search index is nearly impossible, even with the strongest venture backing imaginable. Furthermore, since google controls the index to the worlds information they are able to delist topics or pages that users may want to see.

[lucideer]

> in practice, a significant proportion of their EU staff will already be unionised

Citation needed. Unions are something that's actively discouraged within US multinationals' EU offices as well, so I wouldn't be so sure the overall picture is rosier in Europe than it is in the US.

[ghaff]

>we are going to see some sort of professional regulation in software engineering

That could trivially exist. There is PE licensing in other areas of engineering (and used to be in software) although it's not super-common outside of civil engineering given the purpose is mostly to sign off on stuff that goes to government regulators. Of course, it probably doesn't make much of a difference--the ACM and IEEE already have codes of ethics. And, by the way, that now means you probably can't be a software engineer if you don't have a 4-year degree from an accredited school along with some other requirements.

[chiefalchemist]

Customers? I think you mean users. People using Google are not its customers. These people are the source of its raw materials.

Google's custoners are the entities that purchase the products Google produces with that raw materials (i.e., data).

This will help get you up to speed.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/living-und...

[pjc50]

Boycotts are a classic means of effecting consumer pressure, but their effect is pretty limited.

[jasode]

>Google's customers

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...

[indigochill]

> Not sure how a users' union would have much leverage since they don't pay.

Well, advertisers require traffic. If traffic adjacent to Google ads dried up, so would the value proposition of Google's products to its advertising customers. In this way, users collectively could exercise leverage on Google and its advertising clients by boycotting sites/services that serve Google ads (though good luck organizing that).

[matsemann]

I think most GSuite customers would love a customer union to twist Google's arm when they screw something up and refuse to answer support tickets..

[j_shi]

Bingo and similar deal with Facebook. The best way to get leverage and power with FBGOOG is for advertisers to cooperate instead of compete. We are trying to do this with ecomm advertisers right now (by getting advertisers to coordinate instead of bid against each other) but goes beyond any particular ad vertical

[cj]

> The advertisers are the ones paying billions into Google's revenue

I control a decent chunk budget on Google Ads (although probably not comparable to Fortune 500 spend) and would happily sign up for a customer union, along with a "users union" if one were to create one :)

[CaptArmchair]

It's called a "consumer group" or "consumer organization". These already exist. [1] In the EU these groups already take action on behalf of consumers. [2]

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/

[kludgeon]

i think OP is imagining something closer to monopsyny

[kace91]

The point of unions is that workers are the ones keeping a company afloat. If they act in sync and decide to stop working the company is screwed.

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.

[robertlagrant]

A union telling me to suddenly move off Google Cloud because they've told Google they're doing it is unlikely to be high on a list of business priorities.

[robertlagrant]

Ultimately unions are about power - transferring an individual's minuscule power in the employer-employee relationship to themselves, to aggregate into something big enough to make a difference to the employer.

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.

[amelius]

I can certainly see YouTubers starting a union.

I can see Apple developers starting a union too.

Basically anything that's a platform where people make money could rightfully have a union.

[frenchy]

Those are really more like employees than customers. The chief difference here is that a customer can easily take their business elsewhere, and has no use for a union, but an employee can not.

[iandanforth]

This is a good idea. Large, and small, groups of individuals do influence massive organizations like Google. Lobbyists do it on behalf of groups, taking advantage of their personal connections to get access to decision makers. Public action orgs like Sleeping Giants use collective shaming to influence decision makers. Activists of all stripes use protest and direct action to create change.

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.

[dazc]

You can vote with your feet and use alternative services. Of course, we have gone so far that most people will continue to use Google but it does, at least, help send a message.

[dgellow]

Does that actually matter? Since a while now I minimize my use of Google services when I can, but I still have to be part of their ecosystem because I interact with others. For example Google still has access to almost all my emails, and is very likely to harvest the data, even if I'm paying for a dedicated service to avoid using Gmail.

[guerrilla]

That would be the point of a consumer union, to vote with feet en masse.

[fab1an]

Back in the Web 2.0 days, I started a "users' union" at the then largest German social network StudiVZ. It was only half-joking, and to my surprise quickly attracted the attention of the network's founders, who reacted in the best possible way, trying to utilise it as a feedback channel for the product.

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.

[splaytreemap]

Entirely depends on what the goals of the union are. If you want to improve your position in search rankings, a union is not going to help you. If you're a youtube creator who wants a larger cut of advertising revenue, a youtube creators union may make sense.

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.

[tlb]

Worker’s unions have tremendous negotiating power. They can call a strike and expect all their members to obey it.

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.

[DarkWiiPlayer]

Reminds me of the youtuber union that, as far as I know, went nowhere because most content creators apparently prefer to just bitch about how bad it is instead of trying to change anything.

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.

[smeej]

Even if it were theoretically possible or legally possible, it would remain practically impossible. You'd never even be able to get enough awareness of it for people to know about it, much less convince people to care.

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.

[jmkd]

This is not only dismissive, but pessimistic and derogatory. Consumer confidence in big tech is way below its peak and continues to fall. The idea is both practically possible and perfectly legal (where you got the idea that a consumer group would be illegal I daren't imagine), but as others state on this page you would benefit from an actual customer group (advertisers) in addition to a consumer group (users). It would be great PR for Google to have open channels like this.

[hkt]

Yes! There is already such a thing for a bank in the UK:

https://saveourbank.coop/

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.

[shadowgovt]

If one is to go this road, one may consider the model of the boycott organizations structured by the NAACP---how they designed them, how they enforced them.

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.

[dgellow]

How would that be different from customer advocacy groups that already exist? Is the concept of a customer union similar, or is it something else?

First time I read the term, and online searching doesn't give me relevant results.

[SuoDuanDao]

When I read your second line, for a second I thought you weren't finding anything relevant about customer advocacy groups and thought 'oh no... it's starting'.

[sudosteph]

I'm down - I 'd rather see a broader -"Personal Data Provider Union" though. Since our personal data is supposedly worth money, it seems reasonable to least attempt collective bargaining as way to negotiate some protections around it. I actually proposed this "Data Union" concept a while back on the Andrew Yang subreddit, since data ownership is a part of his platform. But unions aren't super hot in general right now. I still like them though, and am an IWW member exactly because I think they still have potential.

[caeril]

No. Just stop using their services/products and block all their prefixes at the network edge. They've had ample opportunity to not be evil, and they've chosen precisely the opposite, every time.

[ryanmercer]

I personally see no benefit from a scenario like this and my gut reaction is to think "how would this end up costing me more money?" and I don't have a whole lot of money to spread around as is.

[epc]

In 1955 IBM mainframe users formed SHARE which grew to be one of two mainframe user groups (the other being Guide, defunct since 1999). SHARE runs conferences, provides software builds (or did) and serves as a way for MVS ("Z/OS" this week) and VM users to pool together requests and requirements with IBM.

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.