B-b-but Google made this fancy video advertisement about how I can give my infant daughter a Gmail account and write to her as she grows up! Does it only work if she never uses it? You've gotta wait until you can hold a bat mitzvah to hand it off to her?

This kind of chicanery is why I can only chuckle when Google announces new initiatives that require significant customer service, like selling telephones or providing a fulfillment system to compete with Amazon Prime. They treat their users like ants. And given the way their business is structured, that scale is about correct.

Google doesn't need for any given user of their service to be pleased. They're a whale, straining krill from the ocean, playing a vast advertising numbers game on a scale individuals can barely grasp, and can barely factor into.

Which is not an illegitimate position. But it poses a problem for individuals who are swept into its gaping maw - there is zero incentive machinery to compel Google to ever get things corrected. Depending on where a product is on its growth curve, it might even cost Google more to fix the problem than to replace the users. Your only recourse is to hope for enough public embarrassment to short-circuit the system.

It also calls into question the viability of their entry into any business where service is a differentiating characteristic.

To be honest, I think a large part of the blame goes to COPPA. I remember listening on those hearings, and those opposed to COPPA warned against this exact thing happening. They said that taking the decision away from parents would lead to disaster, and guess what, it has.

Rather than blaming Google here, shouldn't we be writing our legislators to repeal COPPA? We should be telling them that this misguided law is starting to intrude onto the choices that parents make when raising their children, and that it should be repealed immediately. As long as COPPA exists, we'll see more and more stories like this.

There are many women, myself included, who have directly benefited from the message that I could (if not, should) do a startup.

I was previously on an academic treadmill. It was more or less assumed that if you were capable, you wanted to be a professor. It took awhile before I could really see the pros/cons of tying my research to that particular structure.

I think a lot of women -- highly competent women -- are stuck in similar treadmills -- Law School, Finance, Consulting, Grad School. If they're not presented if this alternate life path, it may take many more year for them to get started.

And that may be when they have a family, and that may put a damper on startup ambitions.

Absolutely people have the right to make their own choices, and it's possible that different genders/families/ethnicities/what-have-you will make statistically different choices.

But I really don't think we are doing such a great job with presenting women, or the population at large really, with the full range of what's possible. There are a lot more people out there who would be happier doing a startup, or any kind of entrepreneurial endeavor focussed on something they are really passionate about, than are actually doing one.

There's really a lot we can do in this arena, and I don't think this industry's exhortations or encouragement really represents some kind of dismissal of women's choices or co-opts free will.