> Corporations don't gain by cancelling their customers.

Sure they do. If a certain customer's behaviour is alienating or obstructing other customers, then that customer gets cancelled, because they are having a negative impact (on the business - not the users!) that is larger than the benefit they provide.

That's a net positive result.

Ignoring your whole concept of "mean", it is 100% up to the company to decide what the negative behaviour is, which is part of the problem.

Sure some of it might be "mean behaviour" and so we look at it as Google doing a good thing perhaps.

But what if you went around Google's services and informed people of better alternatives to their services, and you started to actual gain traction and cause people to stop using Google?

There's nothing mean about that, in fact you're providing a good service to those people. But in Google's eyes your actions are negative, and they could just cancel your account at their discretion because they don't like what you're saying.

That is the kind of thing that regulation protects from, when dealing with essential services - and I think there's a stronger and stronger case to be made that these large providers are in fact essential services.

p.s. Devil's advocate: the theoretical actions I described above (recommending alternatives) could so easily cross the line into spam. But who decides where that line is, if Google was to be regulated?

>If a certain customer's behaviour is alienating or obstructing other customers

This is not a random cancellation.

There is zero incentive for your phone company to cancel an account in good standing otherwise.

The OP said "they'd love to [cancel my account] if they could". Why would a phone company "love" to cancel accounts?

I was specifically addressing the other rather broad statement that I actually quoted.

To address your point too though, there are definitely customers that the phone company is required to serve that they would rather not serve, because the costs are higher than the revenue.

Remote rural customers, customers who need accessibility-related support, certain outdated services that people are grandfathered into and don't want to cancel, etc...

And again that's where regulation protects the customer from the corporation that doesn't care about the customer's needs, unless they align with their own needs or are forced to via regulation.

The blurring of and overlap/cooperation between corporation and gov't also shifts incentives. For example, you can skirt fiduciary responsibility by appealing to regulation.

There are a lot of stories of people paying for Google Services getting locked out too.

Personal experience, once I created an Adword ad using one of the image that Google Ad creator had suggested. It was nothing, just a woman in bikini. It was approved and then rejected with warning that I violated their guidelines. I wanted protest but thought probably not worth it. This could have perma banned me from Google, I stopped using AdWords.

>It was nothing, just a woman in bikini.

Do you think Google really cares about this, or do they get pressure from "outside" forces to impose such rules?

I seriously doubt Google cares one wink about people posting bikini photos. These rules exist because activists put pressure on the company to enforce such rules, for better or worse.

Adwords, youtube, adsense carry that danger. Setting up a youtube channel become risky.