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Comment by walesminutecopy | Hacker News Reader

This might be the relevant section in the Terms of Service:

Public streaming Drive allows you to store, share, and stream video content, but should not be used as a replacement for a content distribution network. For large-scale public streaming, YouTube is a better fit. Drive will restrict usage when it appears that it's being used for large-scale public streaming. Repeated violations may result in additional action, including terminating your account or ability to use Drive.

https://support.google.com/docs/answer/148505?visit_id=63725...

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> Drive will restrict usage...

> ... including terminating your account or ability to use Drive.

I think that the controversial part is that the file was deleted. I'd find it surprising if some file from my Drive is just deleted instead of restricting public access or using another form of enforcing the policy.

Google has no obligation to be anyone's mouthpiece or loudspeaker, and we have no information on whether any files were deleted.

The idea that a file was deleted as a first step is pretty out there. There is NO evidence of that. The usual progression is to deny streaming, then warn and close account ultimately.

Question is this a paid google storage / CDN account? That would be different. It sounds like this is bog standard gdrive.

Next step will be, "Verizon has no obligation to be anyone's loudspeaker". No one is obliged to be anything to anyone if you put it that way, but then there's this thing called discrimination that goes counter to that - it expects a VERY GOOD reason to deny service to someone. "I have no obligation to sell to blacks", for example, does not stand. "I have no obligation to hosts anyone's word when I don't agree with that they say" stands? Perhaps we should get a list of all the things we are allowed to say and stop communicating through the internet altogether, as the list will have every information we will ever need to access.

Stopping the spread of harmful misinformation is a VERY GOOD reason to deny service to someone.

Who decides what is disinformation? A politburo in Google? Some high office in the USA?

I understand if they give a safebrowsing warning that the document contains potential misinformation, like for sites with potential malware. Blocking is not the right way to solve it. Censorship is always abused, in the end.

Can you quote where this article says the file was deleted from Google Drive? (it doesn't, but goes to great effort to disguise this fact).

I made the same assumption that the news contact may have been unrelated, and they just had far too many people access it.

Yep no big conspiracy here.

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