You cannot feasibly provide any level of acceptable human support and remain “free” with a huge user base. Meanwhile, being “free” is crucial if your actual paying customer is the advertisers. If you stop being free, you (gasp) normalize paid service. Suddenly you are conflicted and fighting two fronts, you compete with other paid services, your users can actually demand things and vote with their money, etc.
Remember, over $1 BILLION dollars a quarter of free cash flow into their cash hoard EVERY QUARTER.
An absolutely stellar customer support network with real people was being operated by Network Appliance when I was there for less than $60 million A YEAR.
Google is absolutely capable of providing a level of service that is unmatched, but they choose not to.
In my personal experience NetApp support was excellent, but most of their customers were at least sane, computer literate, and able to communicate coherently. That situation does not obtain with the masses of Google users.
It's possible that Google could provide support, but they are also trying to create a reputation of providing infrastructure so reliable that the technology is simply finished and doesn't need support. They don't want to give the impression that they're giving up that battle.
Even if that was completely correct it wouldn't apply to their paid services like Workspace, Google Fi, YouTube Premium, etc that also have no customer service whatsoever.
Any entity that can control an aspect of your life but doesn't give you the possibility to even talk to a human should not exist. I had to call the IRS today and with a little navigation cheat sheet, I found how to get ahold of someone with a 30 minute wait time. It sucked, but I spoke with a human that was very courteous. For a government agency, people dread it. But I at least have a ridiculous timeline to respond and can engage with a representative of the government. Google can virtually shut down your ability to access websites tied to an email, and now you're extraordinarily SOL without any recourse except for legal action. Not to mention they don't even tell you rules you violated if they give you the boot. Even the government today has to do that. But a private company? God forbid!
Except I believe that there’s a deeper cause here, the misalignment between the interests of the actual users and the company to whom the users aren’t actually a source of revenue except by numbers that can be shown to advertisers and investors. (Further down this goes to our expectation of free service; it was all fun and beta at first but it turned out to be a trap.)
Importantly, providing human service will address a symptom but not eliminate said misalignment—it’ll keep manifesting itself.
Simply put, especially in a 2FA worlds, emails need to be a right. Let's say you have a government account tied to your gmail account. Gmail locks you out. The government then tied your ssn to that email account. How do you sign up for the government account now that google has effectively prevented you from interacting with the government?
That kind of stuff needs to end. Email's are required to conduct business and interact with the govenrment nowadays. A private company should not be allowed to just remove your ability to interface with businesses online. My bank can't effectively steal all my money and close my accounts just because I have a personal viewpoint or hell, even committed a felony! But for some reason (especially redditors) people think it's okay for a private company to shut someone down entirely just because of some form of speech or whatever reason simply because it's a private entity.
Yeah, the problem isn't that Google offers a free no-support email option. That's a legit market segment.
The problem is that because so many people misuse that option they deny the economies of scale that would support flourishing paid email providers. And a lot of people think they are OK with the no support plan but they really aren't, and this turns out to be the case when a bot shuts them down. Unfortunately the paid privacy focus email providers suck right now, both at spam filtering (looking at you, protonmail) and the overall UX. Gmail is just much better.
