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Comment by gullyfur | Hacker News Reader

That's disturbing for consumers, and of course Google will attempt to force you to arbitrate for remuneration.

Perhaps the Google Music consumers can perform the overwhelming "mass arbitration" denial-of-service against Google that was on the front-page a few days ago?

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Unlike most companies featured on HN, including several which compete heavily with Google, the end-user Google consumer and G Suite and GCP terms have never included an arbitration clause. They did have one in their US employment agreement for a while but were successfully pressured to drop it.

That said, if they already stopped cancelling customers yesterday (my $7.99/mo is still active) as another commenter said, it sounds like a glitch that they'll aim to fix, so a class action would be premature. Some customers have even reported ad-hoc fixes.

They've always been bad about communicating externally in a usefully sensitive way, even when they really need to. This is unfortunately no exception.

(Disclosure: I used to work for Google until about 5 years ago, but I have no inside info on this incident and certainly am not speaking for them now.)

a bit of topic, but what is arbitration and why is it bad? We don't have it here in Europe (or at least is not very diffused).

Can someone eli5 for me? Thanks

It's a contractual clause that forces you to go to a private court like thingy to resolve issues instead of going to a real court of law.

It's not necessarily bad but given that there's usually one party deciding which arbitration provider to use and might even pay the bills and since those providers are a profit seeking organization at the end of the day, it's questionable if they're truly impartial. There's some research that they overwhelmingly decide for the big corp side of disputes but I'm to lazy to look it up and I'm also not sure if that's conclusive in any way (maybe the corp's position really is better?)

It's essentially a private court, where the parties ask a third party to quickly and cheaply settle a disagreement.

When used responsibly, it's great.

It's bad when a corporation requires arbitration (at the arbiter they choose -- which is a conflict of interest) and bans using the public government court system, as part of the terms of service of the product.

> a bit of topic, but what is arbitration and why is it bad? We don't have it here in Europe (or at least is not very diffused).

You have plenty of arbitration in the EU. It involves a "third party" (supposedly outside of the control of either party involved) which resolves the dispute between the two parties according to the law en possibly some other set of rules which both parties agreed to before entering into a contract. This avoids going to the judiciary and is usually a lot cheaper for the customer as well as the loser of the proceedings. The disadvantage is, that in some cases the use of such arbitration voids legal (civil) cases to be made (e.g. agree to arbitrage, you cannot sue).

Some arbitration is set up by law (enacted by law), some is set up by special interest groups to avoid differences between companies within the same line of work and some are set up by companies themselves. In the EU it is mostly the first two.

My personal opinion is to avoid them like the plague unless you have no way to go to court (e.g. no money) as they rarely have solid arguments and rule in favor of the companies way more often than not. As far as I am aware you are always allowed to reject arbitration in the EU and go to court, though that might be more difficult and expensive and not always wise. Contact a lawyer beforehand would be my advise, most EU countries have some form of basic (free/cheap) legal assistance.

See https://ec.europa.eu/info/live-work-travel-eu/consumers/reso... for instance

edit: list of all commissions is here and https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/main/?event=main.adr.show... and is about 450 items long

edit2: As far as I know, force arbitration is generally considered "unfair" but this differs per country and might not be applicable in all circumstances. Some explanation: https://www.hausfeld.com/news-press/mandatory-arbitration-in...

Thank you, Yes what i meant was thinking was "forced" arbitration, but is not what i wrote.

>>of course Google will attempt to force you to arbitrate for remuneration

Arbiteration thankfully isn't a thing outside of US much. I would love to see what would happen if you took them to small claims court in UK for instance.

At best I'd expect you would get a ruling that they should restore your free service. But enforcing it would be another matter... I expect to see Google Play Music retired (in favour of YouTube music) first :)

In most US and Canadian jurisdictions I'm aware of, small claims court can only award money damages, not injunctions or other court orders. I'd guess it's the same in the UK but don't know. So they could probably award damages in the amount of the grandfathered discount from list price for the remaining expected lifetime of Google Play Music, which would be a very enforceable award (at least after any permitted appeals) since Google is too widely present to dodge paying judgments.

Small claims court (which also exists in the US) is almost exactly the same as arbitration, but run through the government court system.

And a Toyota Prius is almost exactly the same as a space shuttle, except it's not a spacecraft.

All subscription contracts provide that they can be cancelled by either parties with reasonable notice. If that was not the case we would have open-ended contracts that can never be brought to an end, which would be obviously unfair (and in fact such contracts are deemed unfair in many jurisdictions).

In this case it seems that Google's promise was only never to raise the price.

That might sound misleading because consumers are not used to have a company cancel on them (they want to get paid, right?) but that's always a contractual possibility.

That’s not the case, and it needn’t be the case. In common law jurisdictions courts rarely order specific performance. So for perpetual contracts, which do exist, a party would just need to pay expectation damages to the other party to end the contract.

That's rather nitpicking.

On the consumer side perpetual contracts are unfair, and subscription consumer contracts essentially always include termination clauses on both sides.

In the end this usually means having to give reasonable notice, which can also be an implied term.

Now, if you consider commercial contracts in general that's different.

What's unfair is Google offering lifetime deals, getting consumers because of it and then pulling the rug from under them when it's no longer convenient.

I basically agree with what you said, but want to point one thing out:

> All subscription contracts provide that they can be cancelled by either parties with reasonable notice

Apparently no notice was given. Either way, this seems to me like it's a bug rather than a contract issue

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