Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could.
There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner.
Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined.
At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix.
When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.
Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality.
The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point.
If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence.
I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
If enforcement can't be managed at that scale, things of that scale should be shut down. Platforms are not an inherent good.
Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way.
Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place.
So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.
Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady".
The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation.
Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works.
Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process?
We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system.
It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
"GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on.
Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.