Also the notion of requesting more storage in an unlimited buy is a no-go anyway for me. Don't try to sell me unlimited something and then get weird when i use it as labeled. Ugh.
When your neighbor says, you can borrow my tools anytime he expects some good faith from you. You cannot go to his home everyday and borrow every tool and claim, but you said "anytime"
Your local park also offers unlimited playground time. But if you start practically living there and start hogging the slides 100% of the time, there needs to be new rules.
That's how society works. Can't believe this needs to be explained.
And the comparisons to borrowing things or being given things for free are weird. Google isn't your friend or benefactor, Google is entering into a commercial relationship with you. I can't believe that this needs to be explained. If I say you can come and borrow my tools anytime, the first time you come over to borrow my tools I can tell you to leave my property or I'm going to call law enforcement. I'm not obligated to you in any way.
The fact that they didn't explicitly tell you not to store 8PB of data on a service that costs $12/mo doesn't preclude you using COMMON SENSE. "But nobody told me" stopped being an excuse when you were in preschool.
You link me to Google suggesting people setup a 24/7 cam stream rip dumping directly to their drive and I'll go ahead and concede it's the equivalent of "please smear feces on our walls".
Spend 5 minutes on r/datahoarder and you see people writing scripts to bypass built-in upload limits to try to gently impose "social norms" on people. Just don't be that guy...
That's not how the market works, though. Would you pay $100/m for borrowing your neighbors tools anytime?
What if you're running a business and you depend on those tools, what hours can you get them? How does maintenance work? What is he obligated to do, anything? If he decided to retract the offer, change the terms, not give you the drill on a Wednesday because he's feeling sick, do you get refunds?
None of your "casual neighbor verbal agreement" example applies here of course because we're not exchanging money. It's not a service, they're not a seller and you're not a buyer.
When you are a buyer, and they are a seller, suddenly people want explicit terms of a contract.
Imaging pumping gas in your neighbor model. "Eh, just pump an honest amount, pay what you think it's worth" - would that fly? Of course not, the gas owner wants a very specific amount for each and every drop of gas.
Do you think Apple or Google has short contracts for when you signup? They must, if they have good faith right? No, they don't. They have pages, and pages, and pages of written legal terms that you as a user are "agreeing" to try and cover their asses should you decide to try and sue.
All these companies with huge lines of legal spaghetti are doing that because good faith doesn't in the majority of cases.
Look at it a different way: I have "unlimited" internet from tmobile. Are you telling me there's no fine print that dictates exactly how limited my "unlimited" is? So Tmobile clearly knows unlimited isn't unlimited - the users are the only ones with "good faith" apparently. But that's how marketing works, isn't it?
I don't care about downloading 20TBs, i'm not an abuser. I do however care about knowing the limits of my "unlimited" plan, which are very real and easily reachable.
It's funny how the limits of Unlimited can be reached in just a few days of youtube videos.
These limits don't feel like limitations on scammers and abusers. They are not designed to stop people from downloading 20TBs of data hoarding. They're limits that normal people reach easily.
Imagine a road having "no speed limit", but cops enforce a 200mph speed limit. That seems reasonable to me. They'll pull over people actively trying to break the sound barrier rather than merely trying to get to work going 80mph.
Now imagine that same road, with "no speed limit" - but cops pull you over at 80mph[1]? These aren't people actively trying to kill someone. They're normal, non-abuser people.
Tmobile's data limit isn't even remotely about data hoarders. My 5 year old thumb drive is 10x bigger than my Unlimited data limit.
[1]: This is a somewhat location dependent example, but over here (WA, USA) that's frequently obtained by "normal" people.