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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any deception here. There was no contract, nor promise made. Google had a free service. They didn't like how it was being used (probably by other sites) and changed the terms to something they liked better. It's their service; they aren't honor-bound to preserve other people's business models.

Would you say the same thing if Google thought it was so great that they started a competing product?

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The part that bothers me is where he says they asked him a lot of detailed questions about his model in such a way that they planned on using the details for their own service. I don't see that as being a good thing in the least.

The lesson here is to never answer such questions. It's akin to having your company acquired by another, being asked to teach everything to the other company's guys, and then being fired.

Exactly

They didn't like how it was being used (probably by other sites) and changed the terms to something they liked better.

And that's fine. The deception was in not telling him about it and inducing him to continue down a path with no upside. It's similar to the GIF patent fiasco where Unisys deliberately avoided publicizing their patent until the format was entrenched. It may be legal, but it's scummy.

I'm not finding that in the article. They didn't change the TOS to trap Totlol, I'm all but certain. They changed it because of what they felt was best for the product (probably because of all the crappy link farms backed by youtube content).

And totlol just didn't notice. Again, it's a free service. It's not like totlol had a contract that was violated. They bet their for-profit company on Google's good will, and as it turned out Google didn't care so much about totlol's profits.

It might not have been a deliberate "trap", but the timing is very suspicious. Even if Totlol wasn't the primary reason they changed the terms, they should have notified him of the change since they were actively communicating with him at the time. No, they weren't legally obligated to, but not doing so is getting rather close to the evil line.

Isn't the simpler explanation just that the people communicating with totlol weren't the same ones responsible for the TOS change and that no one thought to connect the dots? It's not like google is a hive mind.

Why invoke conspiracy when mere inaction is a better explanation?

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