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Comment by jcampbell1 | Hacker News Reader

Google cites abuse as the reason for shutting down the translate API. I find it ironic that they have engineers smart enough to write software that can translate human language between hundreds of language pairs, but can't write software to stop abuse.

I'll let Google in on a little secret: If you charge more for a service than it costs you to provide, then there is no such thing as abuse.

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The cost in goodwill (and perhaps even real money) of using translate to fill hundreds/thousands of google ad-filled spam sites in hundreds of different languages may be much higher than they could ever conceivably recoup in charging for the API.

Once you charge more than any legitimate user would be willing to pay for the API, you are effectively shutting down the API anyway.

Are spammers going to be willing to pay x cents/call just to fill spam pages with translations? We must make x high enough that spammers will not make enough profit to justify the expense but legitimate businesses that depend on the API will still be able to pay for it.

Spam is all about maximum distribution and massiveness, so I don't think the pricing would have to be very high to take the profitability out of the spam operations.

The spammers would only have to translate each page once. Further, they could translate only the pages that users request in language X as needed and cache the results.

And what stops them from doing this with any of the other translation services out there? translate.google.com isn't going anywhere, and if they're actually having a problem related to abuse (as they claim on the Translate API's site), I seriously doubt that spammers are going about this in this way. The notice seems to say that the Translate API is overloaded -- charging x c/call would definitely diminish the load, especially if we consider that most spammers are not going to want to give real payment data to Google in the first place (since it can then be subpoenaed and used to prosecute or otherwise identify the spammer).

Well, maybe not just that type of abuse, overusage without benefit to Google. Of course there could still be abuse of some sort, like somehow using a service to spread spam or malware.

Somehow I doubt that's the abuse they are concerned about.

Not in this case, but I don't think they consider spam and malware to be welcome. What I mean to say is that even profitable services can be abused, though if we want to choose a more specific word than 'abuse', the point may be moot.

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