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Comment by warrenq | Hacker News Reader

When entities sell/promise unlimited, they expect some good faith behavior from the users.

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.

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> That's how society works. Can't believe this needs to be explained.

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?

It aint about marketing. It is about giving the user an experience they don't have to worry. It is not about giving an abuser a green light they can get away with testing the limits of their patience.

It's funny, as a consumer i view it as a way to obscure the product and not make it clear what is actually being offered.

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.

This isn't a goodwill issue, Google isn't a charity. This is a product they sell for a profit. They are selling something, unlimited storage, and getting mad when people use it as unlimited storage. If they can't make a profit doing that, which they obviously can't, then they shouldnt advertise it as such. Why am I supposed to take pity on the plight of Googles marketing department?

Because you're ruining it for everyone. You're the guy that goes into the bathroom at a rest stop (in Europe, where you pay to use them), smears feces all over the wall, then proclaims "It's a public bathroom that I paid good money to enter, they didn't say what was and wasn't acceptable behavior in the bathroom".

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.

Except the advertising for the bathroom in this case says pay $12 and smear feces as much as you want. Thats what google did. They said unlimited.

Not even a little bit. Google is advertising "public restroom" and you're saying "well they didn't actually say I had to go IN THE TOILET". No, they didn't say that, because they expected you to use basic common sense.

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...

Google should be able to set proper boundaries by now, either with a number, through data transfer rates or both. They have every technical option to set limits wherever they need them. Don't blame users for a flawed system.

Just for reference: For someone using the service properly, no loopholes to get around the 750GB/day upload limit, it would take 30 account years to upload 8PB.

The unlimited was actually capped at 1PB

No, that's how marketing works. There's no need to promise infinite anything.

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.

Acting as a gatekeeper every 5TB isn't the solution. That's half or less of a single hard drive you might get at best buy.

5TB per user.

Which is the same thing if your users take up similar amounts of data.

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