I think that we, as the individual users, let ourselves begin to think that the operators of these online services, many of which are free, are infallible, or that we could ever expect them to be error free. It's as if we all forgot all the troubles we have with the programs on our hard drives because we are accessing programs through our browsers. These big companies are as screwed up, if not moreso, than we are as consumers.
On the other hand, it does seem many times that groups such as the "Googleopoly" think of their users as merely the final stage of a fully automated system, as if we are the "Application Layer" of their OSI stack, which leads either to apathy or worse, the thought that the user is something which needs to be "Fixed".
I fear sometimes that they will have to tick off a sufficient number of individuals before they realize that ALL of their users are individuals and not some monolithic block of robotic parts which support their business.
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