I wince every time someone proclaims the government should step in to regulate something that is obviously none of their business. That's the easy way out, and it hurts everyone in the long run.
This just seems like the normal knee jerk reaction from the right half of the political spectrum that says all regulation is bad.
PayPal did $1.5 billion in revenues in Q1 2013. So you could draw a line at $1bn/year, say, which would be more than high enough to leave out any reasonable definition of a "startup" while still covering established market leaders.
The person doing it won't always have an incentive to avoid the same things that you or I might think of as undesirable. The last thing you want to do is to ask for something, be one of a selection of competing viewpoints on it, and then get the Cthulhu version imposed on you.
Can you get rules that make sense out of a system? Sure. But the tendency is that you won't - at least not without a threat that forces a uniformity of interest upon the system.
"The system" doesn't need to have "uniformity of interest" in order to make sensible things come out of it; you just need to be willing to make your voice heard within it, and to accept that you may have to compromise a bit from your ideal outcome in order to get other interests to come along.
It doesn't mean that there isn't some authority there, but it's silly to act like there is a mandate so explicit that we can legislate things like "make your customers happy within 48 hours of initial contact or the American people will exert physical force against you", which is essentially what people ask for when they say that Google doesn't offer "adequate" service. The proposed laws may not say that verbatim, but that's the idea they'll attempt to convey in typically myopic, broken, unworkable legalese, and to which all companies in the U.S. will have to adhere.
I believe there is a reasonable case for governmental standards and penalties relative to things like food or building safety, but "you must have X customer service agents per customer accessible by phone at least 12 hours per day once you reach $100k in revenue", or whatever, is really pushing it. Why do we believe it's reasonable to get the government involved in such minor, everyday living things? We like what Google gives us, but don't like something about the way it's implemented, so instead of working within the market we go whine to our legislators and ask them to force Google to do what we want? The fact that anyone even considers that does not bode well for the future of capitalism.
Is my sarcasmometer broken?