Unless you live in the EU. [1]
[1] https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/dsa-out-co...
The only winning move for users is to invest in decentralized open source unkillable alternatives.
To me it is obvious they had more than enough time and opportunity to do it properly themselves and the tools at their disposal get more glorious every year. Users grow more and more dependent on them. Services control more of our lives.
They have LLM's now! Really good ones! So good they can format and sort 90% of the customer service issues into well known boxes.
You can also have people pay for support. 1000 euro might be nothing compared to losing an account. Write me a nice report what exactly went wrong. It can be [] my fault [] their fault. It can result in [] permanently banned [] account restored. They can [] refund the fee [] ask for ____ more money.
They thought themselves to important to do it themselves. You are unworthy of even the worse kangaroo court and unworthy of trial by robot. Those are pretty damn low standards.
It will eventually happen because we have lots of wealthy influential people in the global law apparatus and they are really being mocked here.
Mega corps are going for the heaviest punishment they can apply for all possible offenses they chose not to describe. LOL You aren't sentenced to death only because they lack the means to do it but I'm sure they are killing plenty of people indirectly.
I even think out taxes should pay for their customer service.
Is that the easiest choice? Hell no. But it makes us a lot harder to kill, and is great for morale.
There you have it. Now try B2C.
You actually can lead a productive socially rich life and even run a tech company in the modern world without using any products by Google, Microsoft, Meta, Apple, etc.
There are open source alternatives to everything if we do research beyond what is advertised to us.
Not carried a cell phone in ~5 years.
I'd recently twigged that I don't want a mobile phone that forwards to, say, an Asterisk server I control, but an Asterisk server (and VOIP number(s)) I can optionally forward to a mobile or other service (e.g., possibly Jitsi Meet or Signal).
That last I could then interact with on a subnotebook laptop or tablet device. The phone would principally exist as a tether or true-emergency comms.
I can say Zoiper worked just fine for employees and Zoiper installs were set up very similarly to how we set up take-home phones; they had/have a browser extension to click-to-dial numbers in our ticketing systems, which was nice -- there may be good FOSS software out for these tasks now.
I don't do anything special at home; I just use a headset connected to PC for Google Voice with a free (in the US, at least) number and don't even see when calls come in unless they leave a message or I know someone's going to call and I leave a Google Voice tab open. Messages get forwarded to email. There are sometimes services I can't sign up for as a result of only having a VOIP number -- Anthropic in particular comes to mind as a company which blocks VOIP numbers for signup, but no essential services (e.g. bank, broker, kids' school) in the 10 or so years I've been phoneless. Yealink makes a really nice DECT headset I use (a WHB640) in and around the house, but it's way too expensive; fantastic range, though.