I'm always surprised by the level of ignorance, but I've seen more than one startup burn because the founders didn't understand which taxes were due and, thus, failed to account for them in their pricing.
> I'm always surprised by the level of ignorance
Such as the ignorance displayed in your comment?
It's not illegal. Google can sue them and bury them in court fees and potentially win a civil suit, but it sure as hell isn't illegal.
However, 300k requests per day surely is enough that this could be considered a sort of denial of service attack and violate fair use.
If Google wanted to, they would scale down their servers for a day, wait for this traffic peak to hit, document how it made the service unavailable to others, and now you have a valid offense to sue for.
Yes. That's also what I said above when I said "Google can sue them". It's not illegal is my entire point. You can sue anyone, for any reason, at any time, and even win. That doesn't make something illegal.
If Google sends them a C&D, and expressly forbids them from doing this activity, and implements technical measures to prevent them from doing so, and they continue doing so then they may start approaching the area of illegal (Craigslist v. 3Taps would agree, hiQ v. LinkedIn would disagree).
illegal means violate criminal code.
> now you have a valid offense to sue for
That's civil, not criminal.
It's pedantic, but words matter.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
300k requests / day is a little over 3 per second. That's not much.