I see no problem at all on measuring it by market share, as a proxy of consumer choice. One just have to keep in mind that the market has to be localized, not aggregated at some huge population.

Market share isn't a good measure unless you can clearly define the market. Make it too narrow and they are at 100%< make it too broad they are near 0% ... especially complicated with products you don't (directly) pay for ...

Should be a county level at most.

But what's the market for Google, from which you're computing market share?

That could inadvertently sweep up popular labor of love projects with almost no revenue, like hobbyist communities or fan sites and so on.

A billion in topline revenue should do the trick. Once you hit that level you have to provide individualized human support. You're allowed to charge money for the support but it has to be available to anyone willing to pay at least a modest fee to communicate with a real person.

If you don't like it fuck you, you have a billion dollars get the fuck over it.

You're right. Don't know why you're getting downvoted. Anglo predisposition against "rude" language?

If a lonesome Pizza Hut franchise can afford to give me customer support, then so can Google, no questions asked. Yet you'll still find people white-knighting for them.

If you serve a lot of customers but have lousy revenue you should have extra regulations which would probably drive you out of business because of the extra cost? Revenue seems a lot more reasonable metric.

Maybe if your business sucks that much that you don't have enough margin to treat your customers well when they have issues... well, maybe your business just shouldn't exist.

That's your opinion. There are areas such as supermarkets that are low margin by nature and most definitely should exist

Supermarkets crucially already have a customer support infrastructure and you can physically go to them to work out issues. If the burden is simply to have human customer support you can speak to then the burden is already fulfilled.

It is absurd that it is impossible to speak to a human at Google unless you have a loud enough platform. Amazon is similar too in many cases. As an Amazon seller the robot once decided that the price for an item on sale wasn’t correct. I told the robot it was in fact correct. The customer support person who I was able to reach after an incredible runaround told me through text only communication that the solution was to change the price either higher or lower. There was no way they could manually verify it. The robot had decided. In the end it took multiple guesses of adjusting the price to figure out what the Amazon robot would accept. This is beyond stupid.

that's surprising; every support interaction i've had with amazon has been incredibly positive, and i'm a nobody...

It's stupid for you. It costs Amazon only some difficult to measure lost opportunity that can't even be cited during performance reviews.

It is pretty stupid that the people who work at Amazon can’t even override the faceless algorithm that makes arbitrary decisions. I don’t care about the metrics. I care about common sense.

And yet there are regulations around health and safety that supermarkets must follow.

And yet, supermarkets close down quite often to make a political statement or when margins aren't sufficiently high enough. Kroger is fond of closing stores in areas threatening to raise wages.

That indicates that a local monopoly exists.

Could be either/or.