I'd really like to hear Google's side of this story, since the story as-written doesn't seem plausible.
There's their side of the story.
They most likely don't have anyone to speak for the company except on bigger issues. Even their product forums are staffed with "community experts" who no one knows if they're Google, community or a 3rd party service and no one with enough authority and knowledge to properly manage things.
Internet: You're accused of not caring about any but the very largest of corporate customers, nor individual customers, and damaging companies that use your products.
Google: We don't respond to such minor issues.
?
It's a massive issue IMO. They know what they're doing, they just don't want to be overt with it as that will damage their rep.
The former should be a legal requirement. But I'm not sure what actually happened in this particular case. We don't even know if it concerns a G Suite account and what the company was or wasn't told about why they got banned.
Let's say that Google has developed a deep learning paradigm to identify -- and ban -- low-value users who violate their ToS. The low-value group would probably include all non-paying users, as well as small G Suite accounts. Let's also say that the paradigm was deployed as an automated solution, since it was 99% accurate during testing at picking out ToS violators, though the exact percentage doesn't really matter. I would imagine that the relevant Google execs did a cost-benefit analysis, and figured that the PR hit and revenue loss associated with a liberal and fully automated use of the banhammer against all supposed ToS violators -- including the 1% that were false positives -- was justified by the benefits to Google's bottom line.
Based on this possibility, it seems likely that Google employees would not _know_ why the banhammer fell in any particular instance -- nor would they care to know, since that would involve digging through the data to figure out which events triggered a positive hit in their machine learning implementation. It presumably wouldn't be worth Google's time and effort on behalf of users already classified as "low-value".
This might also explain why, as mentioned in another post, it took a few days for the banhammer to fall on a start-up, after a dev with a "poisoned" Google account joined the team. Presumably it took those few days worth of traffic and usage data for ToS-Hammer(tm) to figure that the dev had spawned new accounts elsewhere.
Again, I'm not an expert, so pardon any flaws in the relevant logic.
Given the oligopolistic structure of the industry, throwing an unlucky minority under the bus without recourse just because it's statistically "rational" will not hold up.
I think Google knows that and there will be some sort of more systematic fix (compared to reddit posts and friends at Google).
Some AI algorithms can explain how they came to the conclusion they came to and why not have a paid support option as well.
The great virtue of private industry over government is the ease with which you can opt out.
You generally can't opt-out from your government, you definitely don't have to opt-in Google services.
This is almost the polar opposite of Kafka-esque.
Well, sort-of, and still. If you use the web, you are constantly being tracked by Google as people mindlessly put GA code on all their websites. As for e-mail, it's more and more difficult to set up an e-mail server these days because of anti-spam measures, and Google/MS are dictating the terms here - but MS has a much more relaxed policy. Each time I set up a new mail server, I have to go through the same set of rituals, only to discover Google came up with another requirement and will not deliver my mail if I don't do it.
You can't argue both 1) companies are allowed to do anything they want and 2) they can grow unlimited monopolies.
If you do, sooner or later they will surpass national states in power and you have an even worst distopia.
These Kafka-esque arguments are way over the top when applied to a private, profit seeking organization.
TL;DR: After extensive investigation, case review and working with a variety of internal teams, we’ve have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims.
Greetings. This is Alex Diacre again from Google’s G Suite Support team with a followup. In order to protect the privacy of all our customers and users, it is our policy not to disclose information relating to specific customer accounts in public forums. But given the amount of attention this post received, I’d like to offer some insight on the results of our investigation on this matter:
-The original poster on Reddit (OP) did not identify him/herself or the customer account. We have made several attempts to reach out to the OP through PM, but have yet to receive a response. (If the OP or someone from his/her company is reading this, please get in touch with me).
- We have tried to identify the customer based on the information in the original post, including an extensive review of recent support cases, but have not found any cases resembling the description.
To note, Technical Support is available to G Suite customers 24/7 via chat, phone and email. We’re happy to work with the OP to investigate this matter further; until then, we have not found any supporting evidence to corroborate these claims. Technical Support can be accessed at https://gsuite.google.com/support/*
Alex here from G Suite Cloud Support at Google. We're limited on what we're able to share in public forums related to specific customer situations.