That is obviously not true. For example, as soon as you have a contract with a for-profit enterprise where you are paying them actual money, they have legally actionable obligations to you in return.
Any private company will stop entering contracts for a particular service the moment that those contracts stop benefitting shareholders.
The societal value (portability, privacy, openness, etc.) of a product doesn't stop anyone from withdrawing it the moment it stops being profitable. This is what I take to be parent's issue with Facebook in this case.
To continue doing something because it's good for users (even when it's not good for shareholders) you need a nonprofit or a government (or very altruistic shareholders.) USPS is an example of this - it's not profitable to serve rural areas at such low prices, but the government does it anyway while corporations won't/can't.
This is not about a product not being profitable, but about an alternative strategy being more profitable, and an open system does indeed discourage choosing the alternative strategy, precisely because it prevents a single actor from being able to withdraw the product from the market.
With email (well, email before people were stupid enough to use gmail), if a single provider withdraws their email offering from the market, that does not really have much of an effect on the system as a whole, the affected users just switch to a different provider and email overall just continues to work as it always did - which in turn should discourage companies from withdrawing their email offerings in favour of their proprietary offerings, as they would expect people to switch to a different provider rather than to their proprietary offering.
Well, in practice, though, people just seem to be too stupid to understand such basic economic realities as network effects and the effects of monopolies/dictatorships/other concentrations of power and what the long-term effects of those are, and so facebook and twitter do actually have users, so something about that theory must be wrong, I guess.
With email it all boils down to owning your email, on your own domain, with Gmail no less, speaking of which people had yahoo.com and hotmail.com accounts long before Gmail. And if you don't own the email address, it's painful to make a switch, though much less painful than switching from FB to something else.
There is a big difference between email and FB - people depend on email on a daily basis, especially for work. When 2 people exchange contacts, what do they exchange? Their phone and email of course. Do you give out your FB or Twitter handle to people?
Email is reliable, everybody has an email address and everybody with an email address can communicate with you. My father doesn't have the patience to be on FB, he can barely use a laptop or his phone, but he does use email.
My point is - these new platforms for communication will never replace email and I also believe that because of the lock in, FB and Twitter and G+ will never be so relied upon as to be irreplaceable. This lock in these bring is also their weakness.
Yeah, the problem with gmail is not gmail itself, but rather its success. If everyone/a majority/too many people use(s) gmail, that puts google into a position where they would be able to change the system unilateraly, that is why I think it's stupid when people, in particular people who should know better, use gmail. Well, plus the fact that google has plenty of motivation to hinder privacy in emails because their business case is built on reading your emails, which makes it all the more scary that they could get into a position to dominate email.
Other than that: Oh, I hope you are right! But don't underestimate network effects - people were also stupid enough to let Microsoft lock them into word documents, which indeed were practically irreplacable for quite a while, and to a degree still are.
I find it reassuring that Google tried to do something similar before, when Google Groups attempted to take over Usenet, and people using real newsgroups had little time for either Google's "replacement" or for people who were accessing Usenet via Google Groups and thought everyone else should/must be as well.
Google groups was based on Google acquiring DejaNews and building a usenet archive and interface on top of that - mailing lists are a later addition. The usenet interface was (and I guess still is?) terribly broken, making it a pain for other usenet users to deal with posts from google groups users, because it simply works in a way that hinders interoperability with the rest of usenet.
(And while at it: The mailing list feature is also quite defective, obviously built by people who don't really have a clue how email works.)
So basically every email provider, Google, and most of the internet has absolutely no user obligations? That's simply not true, even a cursory understanding of contract law would tell you that. Compensation does not have to be currency to form a valid contract with obligations.
They might be obligated to give notice and let you get your data out, but Google could absolutely remove features from GMail at its discretion. Providing a service doesn't make it obligated to continue providing that service forever.
Google's ToS (which you've agreed to) pretty clearly gives them this authority.
They have a contractual obligation to abide by their Terms of Service (that you sign when you sign up for Gmail) or notify you of changes to them. Not paying currency does not make a contract invalid. The fact that those ToS are broad and easy to amend doesn't remove the fact that there is a contractual obligation.
You're somewhat right but in practice, tempered considerably by the terms of service on most contracts? There are all sorts of restrictions, time / volume / price limits, acts of god clauses, etc. designed to avoid making permanent commitments which would lose significant amounts of money.
Sure, and then the next step is consumer protection laws that negate some of the common tricks to try and restore balance, and so the game goes on.
However, few if any of these protections typically apply to someone who is using a service for free, such as people with Facebook accounts. As soon as real money is changing hands, it becomes much harder for the recipient of that money to get away with not keeping up their side of the bargain.
> As soon as real money is changing hands, it becomes much harder for the recipient of that money to get away with not keeping up their side of the bargain.
Someone who has in the past exchanged real money with Verizon, Comcast and AT&T, I would again submit that the situation is not as simple as you're saying.
I would again submit that the situation is not as simple as you're saying.
I'd be the first to agree that it's not that simple, and that the legal system in many places is not a very effective tool for providing justice in "low value" cases. But even then, there may be consumer representative bodies or government regulators that maintain dedicated funds to pursue bad actors in such situations, possibly through other means. In places like the US, you also have the possibility of class actions if a large organisation is taking advantage of the imbalance to harm lots of customers a little bit each.
Are you actually suggesting that consumer protection laws should prevent businesses from cutting features and discontinuing products?
Of course not. But if, for example, you're paying for a deal where someone hosts your domain and e-mail for a year, and where the domain is to be held in your name so you can transfer it to another provider if you wish, you are obviously entitled to have that hosting for the year you paid for and to your escape mechanism with the domain name if either party chooses not to renew the deal later.
With a system like Facebook or Google Mail, you have little recourse if they decide arbitrarily to close the business down tomorrow, and you have no control over your identity on that system or what would happen to it after any changes.
Only if their terms allow that, and usually if they do they will allow for reasonable notice so you can move to another provider if you wish. Unless your hosting service actually goes bust and disappears, which is a risk with anyone you ever deal with, you should be OK with any reputable hosting service as long as you own the domain that is acting as your identity so others can find you.
This is true of every for-profit enterprise. Why direct it against Facebook in particular?