Terraria on Stadia cancelled after developer's Google account gets locked
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=2
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26061935&p=4
(If you've already seen a bunch of these, I apologize for the annoying repetition.)
We see this again and again. The cynic in me sees Stadia as yet another internal promotion scheme, masquerading as a product.
I doubt this will ever change. The internal momentum of the company culture will make it so. What does it mean for investors? Google has enough money they can just buy their way into markets indefinitely. It will probably keep them going, but I don't expect huge growth. I'd probably be putting my money into other stocks if I had to choose. I honestly don't think people would miss Google much if it was gone.
"We have some of the best cloud engineers in the world, we have one of the biggest fleets of data centers. Not a lot of companies could reasonably implement cloud gaming, but I bet we could!"
That part is true! But then:
"Productization? Pricing? Market-fit? Customer service and messaging? Whatever, we've got good tech, it'll sell itself. We can figure all that other stuff out later, that's the easy part."
...cue the flop. It was always going to be this way.
I’m quickly approaching 40, and I would like nothing more to not have to own the windows desktop that I only use for one thing. To play blood bowl 2 (and eventually 3) a few times a week. If I could do that from a browser on my MacBook, you can bet I’d never own another desktop in this life.
That’s anecdotal or course, but there’s quite a lot of us.
If a developer is not willing to lift a finger to port to mac (a small market, but one with a known size), why would they port to Stadia or some other unknown market?
But more importantly: Mac hardware usually isn't really equipped for high-end games. If you have a pro-tier machine you might do okay, but nobody buys Macs for gaming, at the very least. It's just too niche of a market to go through a lot of effort to support it
The latter isn't a niche market, it's a 'not high-end' market. But that could evolve, I think.
Whereas GNU/Linux, even with the massive amount of games targeting Android, hardly gets to see them.
Same applies to Stadia, which is mostly GNU/Linux + Vulkan, with Google sponsoring Unity and Unreal as well.
You'd think, but a lot of mainstream engine-based games that could "easily" have a mac port never get one, even an unofficial one offered as totally unsupported. Look at Among Us for example. Not by any stretch a high-end game. It runs on Windows, Android, iOS, a bunch of XBoxen, and probably other consoles. I bet the developer could spit out a working native macOS version with the push of a button, but so far hasn't.
Kerbal Space Program is another example. When last I checked, they did have a native mac version, but it was hamstrung in some way--I think it was limited to 32-bit or something.
I can't imagine these examples are actually a huge amount of effort to make happen. As a fan and programmer I'd be willing to do it for free.
A lot of games did drop off the Mac when it moved to 64-bit only though.
I imagine when Apple expands their desktop and laptop lineup to M1 chips, it's going to include many of the games that are available from their mobile catalog.
1) PC gamers tend to revel in owning (building, customizing, optimizing) their hardware; not just because it lets them play the games they want to play, but even for its own sake. RGB arrays, overclocking, custom case builds. Streaming can't compete with that.
2) "Casual" gamers already have powerful devices in their pockets with thousands and thousands of games available, including many free ones and many high-quality ones.
3) Console gamers are presumably the target (?) market. But an Xbox Series S costs $299. The (absolute minimum) Stadia starter kit costs $99; you're already a third of the way there. And then there's the subscription fee. And then you still have to buy the games. Something I don't think Google realized is that over a console generation, the dominant cost quickly becomes the games themselves, not the hardware. If Stadia users still have to buy them at full-price - $60 a pop - that $200 you saved at the beginning quickly becomes a diminishing fraction. You just aren't saving that much, and in exchange, you get the constant risk that your whole library will simply be killed at any moment, as well as...
4) The latency. The problem with latency is it's not a fully solvable issue, no matter how much hardware or money you throw at the problem. There's a physical lower bound on how long it takes electricity to get from your house to a data center and back. And then there's all the routing infrastructure run by your ISP, which a) is outside of Google or Microsoft or whoever's ability to improve, and b) is unlikely to be improved by the ISP because game streaming is basically the only usecase where bleeding-edge latency actually matters. And in terms of how much it matters: one frame at 60FPS translates to 16.7ms. Client-rendered multiplayer games don't have as much of an issue with higher latencies because of client-side prediction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client-side_prediction
Here's the only way I could see game streaming being successful:
An all-you-can-eat, Netflix-style buffet of big-budget games. Like Apple Arcade, except it has games like Call of Duty and Borderlands that you could normally only play on a console or a gaming PC. You pay a monthly fee, and you never have to buy or even download a game. Dedicated thin-client hardware is a waste; anybody who wants to buy hardware will just buy a console. Your target customers don't want that. Instead this would only be playable on existing platforms, primarily desktop/web/mobile, though possibly existing consoles as well.
That would be a decent value-proposition for some people. Those playing really fast-paced games and/or sticklers for latency wouldn't go for it, some existing phone-gamers might, but mostly you would get people like your friend from college who just wants to play Borderlands with you but isn't really a "gamer" outside of that.
Microsoft is the most clearly-positioned company to succeed at this, as far as I can tell. They have two decades of experience in the industry, they have cloud chops and datacenters, and they carry clout with publishers and even have in-house studios (because a subscription-only game buffet it going to be a tough sell when it comes to license-holders).
And of course they've already started: Xbox Game Pass is a smallish version of the all-you-can-eat subscription, and they've been experimenting with cloud-hosted releases. You can even play Control on your Nintendo Switch via Microsoft's cloud. That's pretty cool.
But I don't think this will ever make gaming PCs or even consoles obsolete, mainly because of the unsolvability of the latency issue. It will be good enough for some people.
Oh and Stadia will die anyway, because Google doesn't understand any of the above
Most AAA games already have 200+ ms delays between pressing a button and anything happening on-screen. So there's plenty of room to redesign things to work around that latency in a lot of games
(This obviously doesn't apply to high-end play on twitch shooters or fighting games though, those are pretty much screwed when it comes to streaming)
I think most of the above still applies, but maybe expand "it'll be good enough for some people" to include some portion of average console-gamers (assuming the rest of the productization is done right, and assuming those console-gamers have fairly good internet)
The thing is that, even there, if you're putting it on a TV you're likely not going to want to plug in your Macbook or whatever. Which means, if you don't already have a console, you're going to be buying dedicated hardware regardless. Which significantly cuts into the "savings"/"no-purchase" angle, and steepens the question of "what's the point of this?"
One thought though: Microsoft could use this as a way to keep last-gen console owners engaged. At some future date when the Xbox Series Y or Z or whatever comes out, people with a Series S might still be able to play the latest games by streaming them. They're using dedicated hardware that plugs into a TV, but it's hardware they already bought which is essentially being repurposed.
Edit: Another thing is that the subscription model and the streaming model don't have to go hand-in-hand. I think game subscriptions are absolutely the future, but I think there will always be a market for devices that download and run those subscribed games locally.
Source please?
I have produced / designed / managed a few AAA games in my life and none of them had a 200ms latency between when you pressed a button and something happened on screen. That delay would be horrible for a fighting game or a driving game. How are you even defining "something happening on screen"?
Let's suppose you are right, that there is a longish latency between when your input is polled and when the game systems fully react. That happens to some extent in RTSs, because changes in the game state are synchronized. But in that case the delay isn't going to hide the network latency, it is going to be added on top of the network latency.
A 30 fps game could go through a complete loop, updating everything: object positions, inputs in 33ms. At 60 fps assuming everything is synced to frame rate that would 16 ms.
I was asking for the commenter's source of information so I didn't have to guess what he or she meant. It's possible to make a game that doesn't respond a user's input in less than 200ms, but why would you? You don't need to be making a technical tour de force to respond in 16-33ms.
0: https://displaylag.com/best-low-input-lag-tvs-gaming-by-game...
Found an article from a few years ago: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3725/measuring_respon...
Not all games are that bad, especially these days. And your overall point is correct: adding even a little bit on top of that already horrendous latency is going to be noticeable by players.
200ms, while possible, is far from "most AAA+ games", as OP stated.
Sure, there's people that play on lowest-end consoles, on a crappy LCD TV with game mode disabled, but let's not consider that the norm for all players/all AAA+ games, and I'm going to need hard sources showing whether those worst case environments get even close to triple digit latencies.
Absolutely false, and I don't know where you got that from.
If there was a game that had that kind of latency between input and reaction, people would notice and the reviews would be horrible.
This is one of the worst parts of game Streaming - games potentially being designed around it, making them worse for everyone else.
It's free with an optional subscription for games and 4k.
Regardless though, I think buying full-priced games that you don't actually own is the real non-starter. These aren't $0.99 songs on iTunes; these are $60 investments.
1. You claim PC gamers do it for the hardware as much as the software. Let's assume the data backs that - it certainly seems like it's likely to be true. And I'm biased in wanting to believe it too, because I like to build and revel in the machines that run the games I own. What isn't true is that those same people, people like me, cannot also be attracted to things like Stadia.
2. Services like Stadia do not replace the many games that people play on the many devices that already exist. It's not a "one or the other" thing. They allow those devices to play more games.
The biggest flaw is in suggesting that casual gamers (a term which is flawed for many other reasons) wouldn't be a potential market for a thing like Stadi. Mobile game sales account for almost half of ALL game related sales. 48%, in fact. $76 billion in sales. A thing like Stadia means that people can play more games on their devices.
And let me say, games on Stadia play incredibly well on my iPad that's a few generations old. That's very attractive. Being able to play PC quality games on my iPad when I travel is worth every penny. I'd even argue it's easier to play games on Stadia than it is to play natively installed games. With Stadia, there's no downloading of the game, no installing, not time wasted waiting for updates. You just turn it on, and it works.
First, where you say "casual gamers", I think what you're trying to say is "people who play games on their mobile devices." You go on to describe the abilities that mobile devices have. While I won't dispute that, one thing I think you're missing is that services like Stadia make it even easier to play games on those devices that don't exist for those devices, or will at some future date, optimized to run on those mobile devices.
I'll probably beat this horse to death, but to compare: I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my iPad through Stadia minutes after it was available. It took nearly a day before I could run it on my PC, and after the first several patches I just stopped bothering. Granted, the game is a beautiful mess, but the point is: it was effortless on the iPad, and has been ever since. Not only that, but I can switch to my iPhone, or to my PC and pick up right where I left off. If I do it quick enough, the game just unpaused when I jump to the new device. And I can travel and still play. There's no way my PC, with its UV reactive liquid cooling is going to travel with me.
3. Stadia starter kit is optional. Stadia is free. Do you have a controller? Keyboard and mouse? A web browser? You're good. There is no required subscription fee. You buy the games, and they cost the same as console games. So yeah, if you have a device that can run modern browsers, you don't need to buy a console.
4. I assume when you mention latency, you mean "input latency" - meaning, the time it takes for the game to react to your button press or mouse movement. There are indeed hard limits to how low input latency can be. The game cannot update its entire model and render it in 0ms. It has to make calculations based on your inputs, then show you what changed. But that's not the only constraint. Consider the entire picture: a target on the screen moves, and you need to shoot it. If you're good, it'll take you about 100ms to react. Most people can't react in less than 150ms. It takes 5-10ms to transmit your reaction over USB. It takes the simulation any number of milliseconds to process and tell the monitor to redraw itself. Let's assume the processing time of the game engine is 0ms. The best monitors will add 2ms to the clock.
So, from your human reaction to the resulting frame, at best, it takes from 107ms to react to something on screen and see the results of your reaction.
And that's on your PC. No networking.
What does Stadia add? On a good connection, it'll add 20-30ms. To be fair, that's what I've seen on my pretty normal cable company internet connection over 5ghz Wifi. With most games, you'd never notice the extra time. Are you going to notice it as a pro gamer playing FPS competitively? Probably.
Your assertion that Stadia will die is about the most right thing you've said. Even with a market, Google tends to kill things seemingly at random. What will help it die quicker is if Nvidia's service is able to outperform Stadia in terms of simplicity and streaming speeds.
But saying streaming based gaming won't find a market reminds me a lot of what the cable companies and Blockbuster used to say about Netflix.
People can perceive delays smaller than their reaction window. For argument I'll say it's 50ms is the perceivability barrier, since we seem to throwing numbers around here. I can get 50 or 60 ms lag on my wifi often, and I would say that I have a pretty good connection. So therefore, the input lag potential with stadia is significant. 60 > 50.
There's an entire chain of things that contribute to latency, and network latency is only one part of that chain.
From what I've experienced on a pretty normal, non-optimized wifi connection (meaning I just plugged a cheap TP Link router in and did nothing to its default settings), I don't notice the latency that Stadia contributes making any difference compared to whatever amount of latency I get on my capable PC.
That's not to say network latency doesn't matter. It matters a lot to pro CS:GO players, for example, (who have reaction times in the 130-300ms range, for what it's worth). Those players are will to pay for high poll rate mice to shave off a few milliseconds from input latency, or build $5k+ machines stuff with insanely fast CPUs and GPUs, with $2k+ monitors with 1ms latency.
But Stadia isn't for that kind of game play.
Like I said in another comment, the talk around streaming games is almost identical to people who scoffed at services like Netflix when they first started streaming. You had Laserdisc nerds freaking out about how the streaming would produce compression artifacts, and people like Mark Cuban saying that people were crazy to think streaming video was the way to go, (all while pitching his HD satellite service).
Having used Stadia as a "normal" person might, I'm certain that in the not too distant future, streaming based gaming services will be as mainstream as Netflix is today. Despite whatever compromises it has to make.
The obvious example here is a precision platformer like Celeste, but you can say the same (with less and less applicability) to other games, starting with FPS.
In Celeste, there are a handful of frame-perfect inputs in the game. This means you have less than a 20 ms window to get your input in, or you're dead (the game's only failure state). How is this possible, if human reaction time is only ~100 ms at best? It's because there's a difference between reaction time and timing. Reaction time measures your time-to-react to an unpredictable stimulus. Timing is your reaction to a predictable stimulus. Most of the time in games you are reacting to a stimulus that is at least somewhat predictable.
So with a little training you can reliably make that frame perfect jump. But if Stadia adds 60 ms of latency, that means your character is over 3 frames ahead of where you think she is. You're going to miss that jump a lot until you can reprogram your brain to account for the latency, as much as possible. And even then you'll probably find it harder. Throw in a little variability to the latency, so you think the character is 3 frames behind but she's actually 4, and you're doomed.
Granted, not every game is a precision platformer, so there are diminishing returns for low latency in other types of game. But if you, say, enable cross-play between Stadia and non-Stadia in a shooter, the local players are probably going to have a huge advantage. Even making it work against an AI opponent would require some significant work to make the AI's reaction time keyed to Stadia's measurement of latency, not whatever you originally hard-coded into the game.
I can’t ping my router and get consistent latency that low.
Latency on speed tests varies between 15 (off peak no load) and 100ms (normal).
There is no way that by the time that all adds up, stadia is going to be a better experience than local.
My internet is also shared with other people, in a country with notoriously subpar internet (yay Australia), the closer we get to reality, the less appealing stadia becomes. The kind of game streaming I could get behind is the rainway/local streaming approach where I run the game on local hardware (pc/PS5) and stream to convenient device.
An argument I was trying to make is that for other reasons, and for a lot of games, Stadia is better than local when you take the entire experience into account. Cyberpunk 2077 is a great example of where the overall experience is subjectively better. My RTX 3070 based system renders the game and its bugs beautifully, far better than Stadia does. But is that $4500-worth of eye candy worth it compared to the $0.00-worth of totally acceptable Stadia? Lag-wise, I don't notice a difference.
I prefer playing the game on Stadia now because it's just so simple. I can use a controller or mouse and keyboard with my iPad and play from anywhere in my house. And not just my house - I've played it over a LTE connections several times without issue.
As far as latency goes - people tend to get hung up network latency when it's only a small part of the latency story. Granted, at 100ms, it becomes a bigger part of the story, but people either don't know about, or forget, that there's more:
There's peripheral latency, "system" latency (which includes CPU, render queue, and GPU), then display latency for single player games.
Stadia, or any streaming service, adds network latency. For me, with a pretty normal American internet connection provided by a craptastic provider (because it's the only choice I have), it works great.
For what it's worth, I've also played with some of the "local" streaming tech. No joke, Stadia performs better than streaming using Steam's local streaming app, by a long shot. There's the iPad app (the name escapes me at the moment) that lets me stream my XBox to the iPad, and it's better, but still way worst than Stadia.
OT, but I'm curious, what kind of router do you have? That seems really bad. I tested this on my laptop (over WiFi, in a very heavy traffic apartment building) and see the following:
50 packets transmitted, 50 received, 0% packet loss, time 49115ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.751/1.436/5.000/0.812 ms
63 packets transmitted, 63 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 1.659/110.684/1805.961/305.145 msWhat model of router is it? This really feels like a situation where something has to be broken, I can't imagine any router, no matter how cheap, has an expected ping rtt maxing out at around 2 seconds. Notably, your minimum rtt is under 2 ms, so it's definitely capable of getting a response to you faster than that, maybe it's just overloaded or something?
I'd say your problems 1-3 can be summarized by saying you don't think there's a market for it. I don't think I agree. The prospective market for it is probably console gamers who want to play PC games that aren't ported to their console.
Even CP2077 might be an example of this, because from what I've heard the performance is absolutely terrible on consoles, and if you haven't already spent heavily on an upgraded computer with a graphics card that's going to set you back $1K, you probably can't play it there either. So if you're the stereotypical console gamer, who doesn't care about perfect graphics and the lowest possible latencies, Stadia is going to sound like a pretty decent deal.
And that's before you get to exclusives.
- Stadia will be just as vulnerable to "exclusive content fragmentation" as consoles. Now that they've shuttered their internal studio, they will in fact, be constantly on the defensive in the war of exclusive content.
I suppose it remains to be seen how successful Stadia will be at pull these titles to its platform. I think you're right to worry about fragmentation. If developers view Stadia as "just another platform" that they can just choose not to support when creating exclusives, it'll fail. If Stadia can get them to view it as a kind of drop-in that lets a much larger number of people (with, say, underpowered hardware) play their game, they'll be more likely to view it as a win.
One other plausible market: people for whom the upfront cost of a platform is still too high. It's a lot easier for most parents to justify buying Cyberpunk for Stadia for their kid for Christmas than it is a brand new $500 console, or God forbid the several thousand dollar PC you'd need to play it.
This is an honest question, since I don't game much (witcher 3, death stranding and a few point and click) , and regular 1080 doesn't bother me, so I'm genuinely curious.
And It is weird how resolutions are the focus in streaming when the most important thing is bitrate, feel like we need some kind of standard, because bitrate means nothing to most people.
Yep. I see a good example of this when I watch gameplay videos on Youtube in the highest available 1080p bitrate, and regularly see results that look far worse than playing the game in 720p, maybe even 480p. For example, it's obviously very common to pan the camera through a high-detail scene, which is trivial for a GPU to do, but incredibly information dense for a video encoder. So anything with a lot of detail blurs (in a very ugly way, not like motion blur) when there's movement.
And Youtube has the advantage that the video has as much time to record as Youtube will allow it, it doesn't need to be done with low-latency settings as Stadia does.
Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
> Of course, cable TV is even worse, but ordinary consumers don't seem to have noticed or cared about that either.
According to Wikipedia, a DVB-C stream can be between 6-65 Mb/s [1], certainly higher than YouTube's 3-9 Mb/s (assuming 1080p video). The situation for resolutions above 1080p seems to be a bit better [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DVB-C
[2] https://www.androidauthority.com/how-much-data-does-youtube-...
I plugged in my cable box for the first time in months to watch the Super Bowl, and was shocked at how terrible the video was. I could see obvious artifacts without glasses on, and I can't even tell 720p from 1080p at that distance. Some of my relatives have those MPEG-2 channels, and I remember them being significantly worse.
Not trying to say that cable TV can never be better than Youtube's quality, of course, just trying to give a general impression of my experience with various American cable companies.
Actually, out of curiosity I just looked up the bitrates for my local cable company. The quality seems to differ a lot: on average between 3 Mb/s MPEG-2 [1] and 12 Mb/s MPEG-4 [2]. So I guess my previous statement isn't really accurate and it depends on the channel.
That website appears to be quite interesting btw; it also tracks YouTube bitrates for live and non-live video and in different encodings! [3]
[1] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19126&li...
[2] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?mux=C049&pid=19130&li...
[3] https://www.digitalbitrate.com/dtv.php?lang=en&liste=2&live=...
12 Mbps MPEG-4 should be quite good, for the stations that support it.
To even get on Stadia you have to port to their custom Linux distribution, which is a pretty huge ask for most games.
It runs a lot better (streaming quality, glitches, start-up times) are incredible. Using Stadia in general is a polished (yet basic) experience. In contrast Nvidia very much felt like a hack. Log-in in my steam account, seeing weird window glitches.
I see a lot of comments negative on stadia here,based on bias rather then actual experience. Stadia is nothing short of tech star even with its downsides compare to the rest of the market.
Some of these titles I've played multiplayer via Steam without any of the related issues, granted Steam/Stadia is an apples/oranges comparison.
At the end I suggested we try Armagetron. 2.7MB download and runs on Mac/Win/Linux/Potatoes. I started up a private server and we were running a 16-player game without any issues in literally 5 minutes.
Consoles are great if you play enough, but I found that every time I could squeeze an hour here or there to play, the Xbox needed to update yet again for 20 minutes, and by then something else has come up and I am out.
Stadia lets you jump in and out, no updates as far as I have seen, and just magically works.
Disclaimer: I don't work for Google or any of the game studios and was actually skeptical they could solve the latency challenge.
terraria also highlights the utter absurdity of game streaming. it can and has been ported to practically every relevant device and costs less than a big mac. google invented a billion dollar laser to cook microwave popcorn.
To add a layer of situational irony here: Google already tried to solve the last-mile delivery infrastructure problem and unsurprisingly appears to have found it intractable
This failure was more political in nature though, the technical solution is there
When I write Stadia doesn't provide much value for AAA games, we need to look at it from both the gamer and the dev side. For gamers, if money was no object, one is better off with either a decked-out PC (better performance) or a console (wider variety). Stadia's main advantage is potentially being cheaper - which is precisely the gaming crowd which doesn't attract AAA gamedev companies.
For AAA developers, they need to port their game to a different API, then pay the Google tax, in order to appear on a small platform whose users are often drawn in by being cheap and are less likely to pay for your product.
There's no technical advantage for AAA - now that Google has closed their studios, nobody will try to make features that are only possible in cloud gaming in Stadia. If Google couldn't, can you? What happens when you ran into a problem, can you handle Google "support"?
Stadia could be good for casuals. Except it doesn't have any good discoverability features or even a search bar. Cyberpunk 2077 doesn't need discoverability, but indies or anyone searching for them really do. Its payment model (direct 'purchase', no gamepass) is OK for AAA, but not as a good for casuals. And of course, one still needs to port the game which can be difficult and relatively expensive for indies (Luna is just a VM by comparison).
Google could make Stadia better for casuals, but that means doing something less prestigious, no Google engineer will go for that, and they obviously don't understand the business model.
So Stadia is geared for AAA games/gamers, but doesn't provide good features for AAA, and even Google itself couldn't manage to make cloud-gaming-only features. Stadia can be useful for casual gaming, but the platform just isn't geared for that, and Google is unlikely to change that. Likely result is cancellation within a few years.
There are also many prestigious and lucrative engineering goals at Google that are totally untouchably intractable because money is involved. The Google Play store offers countless examples where graph algorithms and ML could identify the worst behavior for human review. If an established app is deluged by negative reviews, take a look at what’s happening. It’s either become a Trojan horse or a victim of 3rd world scamware competition. The average review for an app does not go from 4.5 stars to 1.5 stars overnight without cause!
Attempting to address this glaring deficiency leads to the following problem: the other engineers who rallied to solve it, in the past, are no longer with Google. Do you like your job? Find a technical problem with no downside, in that case!!!!!!
The last sentence is key: 'for human review'. Google feels humans are damage to be routed around. If there was a way to everything in ML they'd go for it, but if your solution requires human review it's a no-go.
* Nobody is held accountable for the long term success of the product. Making little things work nice is not rewarded. Maintaining UX is defiantly not rewarded.
* Rewarding process over product. That's why you see so many Google products shut down. It takes a few people from L7 to L8 to build it and rewards someone from L6 to L7 to wind it down. Every annual performance review in the process is all roses and rainbows!
Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk - founders at the top who owned it.
More directly, Gabe Newell and Valve.
It might be that google started with Page/Brin and co-ownership might have weakened that a bit, and now they are not to be found.
Not that a single founder is a surefire recipe.
Bill, Steve, Elon, Gabe, were never alone masterminds and definitely not single founders because in companies they created there always was someone else who had shares.
This goes well beyond Stadia - Google has an air of institutional contempt for humans, especially humans who aren't inside Google. Dealing with humans who are struggling with getting bounced by "the algorithm" is something they simply aren't interested in.
That you can only be promoted by creating new things (even if entirely useless) and not by maintaining and supporting existing things (that customers actually want) is an HR problem.
I can recommend reading In The Plex. Quite literally the founders wanted to invert the usual model and put engineers first. There were some anecdotes from those in roles like marketing and so on that they felt like second class citizens.
You could of course sue Google, but that's an extremely expensive and time-consuming option, rarely worth it for a mere consumer. Going to court certainly won't make your suspended account become unsuspended any quicker.
Unless you've waived that right when you agreed to the Terms of Service.
Which would be meaningless in the EU (I think. Possibly just Germany) as you can’t waive that right.
For consumers or businesses? Not being nitpicky here: I am not familiar with the French ruling, so I would genuinely want to know - as regulations tend to differ (businesses, even single sole trader ones, do not enjoy consumer protections). Not really relevant for the Terraria dev as it is his personal account that is banned, from the sound of it - but important.
For consumers. Businesses are considered to have both more (legal) resources to conduct deals as well as a need for more flexibility. However in this case this sounds like the account was personal, so even if it was used for business purposes, the deal was personal. In Europe (France here) typically the distinction is not in the use but in the contracting party.
A business is registered with tax authorities and has an identifying number, if you contract a service without such a number you're doing so personally so for such purposes you're a consumer and bound by consumer laws. Indeed, all registration forms for services ask you for that number and business address. Services that don't want to / can't be subject to consumer protection laws or are not allowed to sell to private individuals require that number and verify it. Services that allow both individuals and businesses ask for it and may treat you differently based on it.
Just think about the army of "Facebook content moderators" who were a popular topic on HN recently due to the concerns over their mental health.
(I am offering no solutions here, for I know none)
It's not a request, it's a requirement. If your account is suspended, you deserve an explanation. You should get one without having to request it.
I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever.
Obviously this will also help the spammers who will use this information to get around the filters.
"You've been banned because our black box ML algorithm says your usage patterns share similar traits to those of known spammers."
Most were payments of about 2€ in the same store next to work.
Whatever I dont use it anymore
We've heard this excuse countless times, but it's simply not acceptable. The foundation of our legal system is that it's better to let a criminal go than to punish an innocent person. How many innocents have to get caught in the crossfire before we start protecting them?
No one would care if Google banning a developer meant they could list their app through a non-Play app store with decent exposure, or a non-App Store at all.
But that's not the reality we live in.
So it's more like if Walmart moved into my podunk town, put all the local shops out of business, and then banned me.
Maybe Google kicked this guy out for the same reason they fired off their own Stadia devs.
* Except in China, in which case it's only true for their domestic Android market
Not yet, but that's my whole point, it needs to be: It's painfully clear at this point that we need a consumer "bill of rights" to protect us from these giant tech companies.
You can't really compare getting kicked out of a bar with losing access to your gmail. There are no "algorithms" automatically kicking innocent people out of bars. Getting kicked out of a bar is a direct human interaction, which is exactly what I'm demanding.
Well they can, just not for the sole reason of being black...
>>This isnt criminal law.
No it is Civil Tort law, but that does not mean your rights are completely removed, nor that principle does not apply
>>This is the right a private property owner (say the owner of a bar) has to kick you out. There are some limits on that
Absolutely, and those limits are normally set either by over riding civil / businessl law passed the government, or a contract entered into by 2 parties
The problem with Google and many other online platforms is their ToS (their contract) is sooooooo one side that IMO it should be considered an unconscionable contract thus void and unenforeable.
Also we have things like Truth in Advertising laws, many times these platforms Public messaging, and advertisement in no way match their terms of service
I am fully in support of the right of a private business to choose who they want to do business with. I am not however in favor of allowing business to use marketing manipulation, false advertisement, and unconscionable contracts in the form of ClickWrapped Terms of Service to abuse the public
the "mah private business" defense is a weak one, very weak, and it is telling that people defending the large companies with this defense often times do not support it in other contexts.
Google has every right to choose who it does business with, but it need to make those choices in transparent, and public manner.
Not exactly?
It's certainly not criminal law. Proof beyond reasonable doubt has no place here.
But it's also not exactly the relationship between a host and guest, where the guest has no rights save what the host grants. Website terms of service purport to be contracts, so there is a contractual rather than ex gratia basis for the relationship.
So, begin interpreting website terms of service as contracts of adhesion, and read in a duty for website operators to enforce those terms fairly, with a reasonable basis (on the balance of probabilities) for harmful decisions.
This isn't the current law, of course, but it's not hard to imagine the law reaching that place from here.
E.g. if a spammer can pretend they're 10 million different people, and each of those "people" requests an explanation, the whole system grinds to a halt.
This is the reason behind a push for more KYC-like verification on these platforms (e.g. asking for IDs). But this comes at a huge privacy cost for legitimate users. So one way or another people who are real, legitimate and with good intentions somehow pay the cost of the harm that is being done on the internet. This is a hard problem.
Source: am thinking/working on this sort of stuff; not representing my employer, my opinions are my own etc. etc.
My first guess would be third-party attestation of identity, with stored credential disposal on a short schedule? Essentially normal-user-verification-as-a-service?
Pick two.
Different companies do different trade-offs. The optimal solution depends on how the internet community weighs each individual axis
A way to square this circle is to have rights engage at the point of payment.
A truly pseudonymous account with no monetization (going either way) has little intrinsic value, and less need for KYC-like identification.
On the other hand, an account with some sort of payment history (either giving money in the case of purchases or receiving money in the case of developers/website hosts placing advertising) faces a higher standard. There's a reasonable probability of real economic harm if the account is nuked arbitrarily, and at the same time any money flow is open to theft or money laundering concerns, triggering moral if not legal KYC obligations.
The latter should also help prevent the proliferation of straw bad actors, since providing payment imposes a direct cost, while the KYC rules open up the possibility of more direct action for flagrant breaches of contract / use of the platform for other abuses.
The "spammer" can only pretend to be 10 million different people because e-mail is free. Paying a tenth of a penny per e-mail has been one of those long-standing impossible anti-spam measures, but walled gardens can implement something like this at their whim.
Maybe. A few problems here:
1. payments come with privacy concerns, unless maybe you're talking about zero-knowledge-based blockchains, but we're a LONG way from such functionality being widespread
2. $0.001/email is actually very reasonable for an attacker; they'd probably gladly pay even up to $1 or more, depending on their exact needs, especially if that comes with an elevated privileges account
3. all of this is easily defeated by fanouts. E.g. if they sign up with bob@gmail.com and then are able to use bob+1@gmail.com, bob+2@gmail.com etc. to sign up for a different service, this defeats the purpose
Again, it's not a "request".
If spam detection and account suspension can be automated, then suspension notifications can also be automated.
I'm not sure I understand where the 10 million number is coming from. Are you suggesting that 1 spammer can create 10 million accounts on your system (which appears to be Facebook)?
Regardless, no spammer has the time to get on the phone and personally dispute 10 million account suspensions — disputes which are unlikely to succeed if there is good evidence — so I'm not sure how the system grinds to a halt.
> Again, it's not a "request" [..] suspension notifications can also be automated.
Can you clarify what you mean by "protecting" them? I'm not sure suspension notifications qualify as meaningful protection
Except for the part where someone has to answer phone calls, it could be automated if the account suspension itself is automated.
I'll also point out my later comment: "I'm not saying that companies shouldn't be able to suspend accounts temporarily. I'm simply saying that there needs to be a way to get your account unsuspended if you're innocent. The way it "works" now is that innocent consumers are without any recourse whatsoever." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063399
And to forestall any replies that providing information to suspended accounts would help the spammers, I've already responded to that point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26063660
Temporary account suspensions that you can quickly reverse on appeal are annoying but could be justified to fight abuse, as long as they don't happen too often. On the other hand, indefinite account suspensions that are impossible to reverse, such as the case of Andrew Spinks of Terraria, are simply indefensible, there's no justification whatsoever for that.
This is absolutely spot on, with the caveat that you do need to disaggregate from accounts to people, which is the hard problem. Having people call a phone number is definitely not going to work as a way of achieving this disaggregation. I'm pretty sure I could create a system to bring that call center to a halt with fairly minimal cost in less than a week of coding.
As an attacker, you can also hire people in call centers to make phone calls at scale for you.
I think we may be talking about different things? I was just talking about a scaling problem of providing legal notifications of account suspensions and providing a means on getting them unsuspended. I wasn't talking about DoS attacks.
Lots of companies have call centers, so I'm not sure what you're envisioning here, or what financial gain there would be for spammers to DoS the call center. After all, their accounts are already getting suspended by the algorithms, regardless of whether innocent consumers have any appeal to this, and DoSing the call center won't help spammers get their accounts unsuspended.
If we can extend that courtesy to people accused of child abuse, surely we should extend it to people accused of internet spam?
Google has the right to suspend, remove your account without prior notice
I'm sure there should be a clause like that in their TOS
Maybe allowing single service providers to capture several billions of users is the problem here.
Maybe they really just need to offer a paid account option with real support, since that has much better incentives
https://workspace.google.com/pricing.html
It includes support, but I'm not sure if that helps in cases where google thinks you have abused the service. I just use it because I like having my own domain, and so that I don't lose access to my email if google locks me out. The idea is that I can update my domain's MTX records and use another email service.
We had a paid Google App account. One of our workers would only login from their computer. It died, and she tried to login from the new computer. It gave a unrecognized machine error, and we had to hire someone to resuscitate the old computer for her.
I know of a company that had the entire companies' accounts suspended without warning because one user did something that violated their terms, but they could not figure out what. The company lost three months of revenue from it and I am not sure if it caused bankruptcy. No help at all from G.
Are we really going to believe that Google, one of the highest grossing companies in the world, doesn't have the money to provide even basic level customer service? If it were really a matter of not being able to afford it, certainly they could offer it for a fee. No, they're stubbornly refusing to address the issues, relying on this lie, and using their market dominance to avoid having to answer for it.
Although obviously if they banned me, I wouldn't have access to my direct support line anymore.
Which they will do literally on a whim. Who are you going to call then?
Is 1000 innocents ok to punish as long as 1 spam message is stopped?
After a lot of trials with various approaches, we settled on letting some criminals go free over convicting someone on weak evidence. Second we decided that trials should be open and evidence viewable by default.
Finally you generally have the option to give some security to stay out of jail during trial.
Closing a google account is a punishment worse than many criminal convictions. And will only get more important as we progress to an all digital existence.
Hire them directly instead of via labor farms, pay them an actual living wage, give them full health benefits, and hire enough of them to prevent overload.
For example, if an automated system thinks an account is sending spam, enforcing a (very low) outgoing email rate limit would be a much more reasonable first step.
Let every abuser requests those explanations, if the decision doesn't change, the money is still kept, which funds that service.
I get where you're going, but I think far more costly to them and advantageous for us is to simply show them that they are unnecessary.
If we can drop them so easily, they can't pull stuff like this anymore. It is possible to drop Google and Facebook.
They do this stuff because people _need_ them and they know that people won't just drop them en mass.
The libertarian in me wants to believe that reputation is enough to make business act in the interests of the consumers and that personal responsibility would prevent customers from acting in their best interests: but we all know this is not true.
And, I know enough to know that any public policy that essentially says “Everything will be fine if everyone just does [X]” is bad policy, regardless of what ‘X’ is.
And that's also why monopolies and giant corporations can and will always form in the current economic system. Crony capitalism is not a bug, it's a feature.
You can. I might be able to (there’s a lot of crap around spam filtering and SPF that I’d have to fight with).
My mother, father, sister, cousins, nieces and nephews? Not a chance in hell.
We have an admin who spends a good 40% of his workweek doing just our email servers. They are a massive PITA.
...until your upstream changes something.
Meanwhile, I'll be pushing my representative for regulatory action.
Seriously, the only reason Google is unaccountable is its scale. Otherwise "Google but with customer support" would be an obvious market opportunity. And the only reason losing your Google account is so impactful is that it controls everything from access to apps on your phone to your email to your calendar to being able to chat with friends. It's theoretically possible to vote with your wallet against Google, but far harder than against, say, Chick-fil-A, which means no boycott gets further than an HN comment.
No startup can compete with Google for those services because Google can artificially offer them for free, and for very high quality, because it's all funded by their advertising business. (Not to mention that a startup would have to "do things that don't scale" and offer real customer support... which also costs money.)
It's not a fair market at that point - you can't say Google is surviving because they offer the best value to customers, simply because the value is so disconnected from the service being offered. And in the other direction, potential customers like me who mostly avoid Google are still "paying" for it in that we're still seeing (and being tracked by) Google ads.
Every incentive mechanism behind the underlying assumptions of a market-based economy - that companies that provide more value are more likely to succeed in the market - is completely broken when you allow trusts like Alphabet to exist.
Its also possible to live without electricity and running water. This disproportionate power model doesn't work there because some people implemented regulations on them. I am beginning to suspect we need similar laws for this.
I hope in america public utilities are not only controlled by the government. Because where I am from public utilities can be publicly or privately controlled. As long as they are all playing by the same rules many private companies have made lots of money providing public utilities.
I don't see the impediment here.
Water/Sewage and Trash are typically run by the city/county government, although it is common for the actual work to be handled by a contracted company.
Power, natural gas, phone, and most others is almost always a private company.
Google isn't at the point it needs to be nationalized, but something needs to be done to limit the fallout that occurs when users are kicked off essential services with no recourse.
You'll very quickly discover why they are not at all alike.
2. You'll die in three days without water. You'll probably be healthier if you spent three days without Facebook.
3. I can't collect water for myself where I live. I suppose I could walk down to the lake, and manually bring up a few buckets of water, but it won't be safe for me to drink. I suppose I can also go buy bottled water, at a ~million-percent markup. There is no economic alternative for me to get water, other than through the water pipes laid to my apartment, by my water utility. I am a completely captive customer for my utility. My water utility has monopoly control of special-purpose one-of-a-kind infrastructure that is used to deliver water to my apartment. That is why my utility is regulated.
4. Unlike with my tap water, there are plenty of functioning alternatives to... Whatever it is that Facebook does for me. If Facebook shut down tomorrow, my life would be mildly disrupted for a week or two, and then would go on with little change.
On the hierarchy of needs, we have air at the top, followed closely by water, shelter, and food, followed at some distance by electricity, and way down the street, that we can barely make out, by grabbing a pair of binoculars, we will see 'Facebook'.
It's just not that important.
Sometimes, it is so abundantly clear to me that this site is full of former teenage libertarians who grew up and still haven't shed all of those ideals.
There have been a number of really great projects coming through HN and other sites recently that are aimed at solving some problem that people on Facebook have: photo sharing, event planning, etc.
Discoverability is really the only problem left.
IOW, it's "possible" for you or me to drop Google or Facebook, but for some lines of business, you're basically stuck working with them.
Maybe? But I worry that politicians will use that as a tool. Look what DeSantis is trying down here in Florida. He wants to fine "Big Tech" for banning politicians during an election. Personally, I'm tired of the lies and provocations and hate speech of some politicians and I don't think any company should be compelled to share those messages.
Alternately we could prohibit posting in any language other than Latin and Klingon, or using the letter e, or accessing our services using any unapproved operating system (and our only approved OS is windows 3.11 with winsock drivers).
Anyway the point is now the company can ban you for any reason at all. Being the wrong religion, voting for the wrong candidate, being the wrong race, etc.
Google is a private company who offers free internet services in exchange for your privacy being violated. They have no customer service because you are not a customer as customers pay. You have no rights on their platform because again, you are not a paying customer. And you agreed to their terms of service when you signed up. They don't owe you anything at that pont.
So stop expecting "paying customer" treatment from a shady adware dealer who gives you "free" "integrated platform" stuff to get you hooked. That's an old drug dealer tactic anyway.
Want to be treated like a person? You have to pay for that. Otherwise stop whining about the tyranny of "free" platforms such as google, twitter, facebook, etc.
The only thing the government should do is fund PSA's to warn people of the rights and privacy hazards of free internet platforms.
Should governments allow caller ID spoofing, spam bordering on harassment, or lazy oligopolies to be negligent?
Governments should do whatever we agree they should. Both governments and companies serve the humans.
The same also applies for Google Play Store where without a doubt you paid at least once and continue for every in-app purchase.
Andrew Spinks, the author of the linked tweet, was a business partner of Google's. That didn't save him.
What’s really interesting is that it seems like of hacker-like in how it was implemented. It was published as a guide and then states passed laws to implement.
Reminds me of a de facto standard that is then implemented by vendors.
I suppose we could start up some form of Uniform Consumer Commercial Code (UC3) that set up practices that are good that could then be passed by states.
I shudder to think through all the arguments about how it would specify some “don’t be evil on social cause X” that it almost smarts my conspiracy brain that the “corporations” started this trend to bikeshed/scissor statement society so they can’t make meaningful economic and commercial policy.
The Federal government struggles to implement new regulatory authority because of political challenges. Various groups of stakeholders will declare any such regulation an infringement on free speech (ie. "The constitution gives me the right to sell fake penis pills to fund my radical political agenda!"), biased against marginalized minority or cultural groups ("My marginalized constituency of blind, alcoholic yak herders have a religious prohibition against reading contracts"), or a unfair mandate restraint of trade ("The Chamber of Meme Commerce believes that this rule will cost 10,000,000 jobs in the meme industry and kill puppies."), etc.
The alternative is all suits under ~$75k(?) don't get heard because they don't meet the requirements for federal court, which obviously can't be right.
This is just an awful example. There is not a free speech right to pay for your own speech by committing crimes, and nobody claims or would claim that there is. Similarly, you don't see the argument made that vendors enjoy the constitutional right to sell fake pills. What spammers want to do, and what anti-spammers want to stop them from doing, is to advertise real pills, and yes, there are extensive free speech implications there.
It also bypasses the federal government in that the code is established by some big council and implemented in (most) states.
That’s why when I live in Missouri and buy something from a vendor in New York, they still have to accept returns, issue refunds, provide for basic warranties, etc. and if I have problems I can easily get remediation in state courts.
There’s 50+ years of where this works ok. Not perfect and lots of room for improvement. But better than the current shitshow that exists like this article describes. If we had the minimum level of legal structure, it would be so helpful.
Because of UCC, if I give away a product for free, I have to support it through its commercial life. So if I hand out knives, for free, and they explode after 20 years, I must still support it. Even if they come with a form that users have to click that says “I will not sue PrependCo if these free knives explode.”
Google’s free (and even non-free) services are causing harm to people and aren’t being supported.
Why does the UCC covers free knives, but not paid Google services?
With services it’s a little different because there is no average unless the contract is missing performance terms. If you agree to a term of performance, then that is the obligation.
Nope. That gives players like Google a platform to negotiate from now and in the future, and it won't curb abuses long term. These abuses are a symptom of economic concentration and a lack of competitive markets. The only resolution guaranteed to work is to break up these companies down to smaller parts until they no longer act like quasi-governments.
Why not both?
A consumer bill of rights and breaking up Google are not mutually exclusive. Consumer protection laws protect consumers from all companies big and small, present and future. Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
> Breaking up Google won't do anything about the "next Google".
The same regulator that has the power to break them up also has the power to prevent the next Google. Good pricing regulations have the power to prevent the next Google. These are solved problems, we just don't enforce the laws on the books or modernize them appropriately.
> It's a bit strange to think that antitrust is a long-term solution when the successful antitrust case against Microsoft didn't prevent Google, Facebook, and Apple from arising.
That's probably because it wasn't successful in the classical sense. Geroge Bush won the 2000 election and settled the case before it went to judgment. If it had, and Microsoft had been forced to break up, we may not be in the current situation.
The Bill of Rights were written over 200 years ago and could really use a rewrite for modern times, but passing constitutional amendments is much more difficult than passing laws. Moreover, the issues involved in the Bill of Rights are much more contentious, whereas pretty much everyone is annoyed by Google's complete lack of customer service.
I also find this statement to be somewhat at odds with your later statement: "These are solved problems, we just don't enforce the laws on the books or modernize them appropriately." How does your Bill of Rights analogy not also apply to your own argument about antitrust?
I would say that consumer protection laws that can be applied in an ongoing, daily basis are better than antitrust laws, because antitrust enforcement is a monumental task that at best can take years to achieve, only comes into play when problems have already gotten out of hand, and may not have the desired results, as you mentioned. Better to try to prevent some of the problems from occurring in the first place, with laws that apply to all companies without exception, instead of trying to just go after a few of the current biggest troublemakers.
And Google is far from the only company who pulls this crap, so at the very least we would need multiple successful antitrust actions.
Right to repair is a similar issue. So, breaking up Google and Facebook might help somewhat with the account suspension issue, but then we also have to break up Apple. And John Deere! And other companies. Or... we could pass right to repair laws. Antitrust feels a lot like Whac-A-Mole to me. Not that antitrust is bad, but you knock down one BigCo, and another arises. Why not more directly address the abuses caused by the BigCos?
I don't believe we are as impotent as your response would imply, and we are certainly capable of putting a stop to these abuses and enforcing laws that create fair, competitive markets. I agree it's a longer term project, but it's the only one that will actually solve the issues. It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on short term fixes.
I don't believe we're impotent, which is why I'm suggesting new laws such as a consumer bill of rights and right to repair. I think that antitrust is actually too little too late in addressing problems. After all, you can't take anti-trust action against a company until it's already a trust. ;-)
> It's a losing proposition to focus our energy on short term fixes.
I think we disagree about which is the long term fix and which is the short term fix. I personally consider antitrust action against individual companies to be a short term fix, whereas permanent universal consumer protection laws are a long term fix.
That's not what the laws on the books say. It's a colloquial term, and nobody like a pedant.
> I personally consider antitrust action against individual companies to be a short term fix, whereas permanent universal consumer protection laws are a long term fix.
Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s. Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage economic concentration and the abuses of labor and society that always come with it. The American government has never succeeded at compliance regulation — it gets weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
Further, how would you make it "permanent"? Constitutional amendments are a non-starter right now, and Congress can't pass laws that have 80%+ popular support. You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-ups under the Clayton Act.
It was merely a play on words, but the point was that antitrust only kicks in when significant market power is involved, some kind of restraint on competition, whereas other laws protect consumers from abuses by companies of all sizes, even the smallest "mom and pop shop" companies.
> Ralph Nader said the same thing in the 60s and 70s. Consumer protection laws have been used to encourage economic concentration and the abuses of labor and society that always come with it. The American government has never succeeded at compliance regulation — it gets weakened and corrupted, and we always wind up getting the worst version of laissez-faire economics as a result.
Again, I find it strange how you think one set of laws can't possibly be intelligently and usefully applied by the government, while at the same time thinking another set of laws can, i.e., antitrust.
> Further, how would you make it "permanent"?
What do you mean? Laws are permanent by default, unless the legislators write an expiration date into the law.
> You know what is permanent? Court-ordered break-ups under the Clayton Act.
Tell that to AT&T. ;-)
It's not strange if you look at historical priors. The US Government has frequently succeeded at regulation that involves rulemaking, investigation, and prosecuting abuses. The same government has failed to achieve its' goals any time it tried compliance based regulation. Sure, both are subject to regulatory capture, but I've only seen the one model succeed.
I'm generally against these types of "consumer protection" movements explicitly because they target the smallest "mom and pop shop" companies. Consumer protection costs wind up driving those smaller businesses out and promote corporate concentration. Once you have that, the corporations are writing the rules, and the laws stop protecting customers (see: Boeing 737MAX).
> Tell that to AT&T.
ATT, Verizon or T-Sprint? If they don't answer I can leave a messaging on their answering machine using free long distance, or send an email using a modem. Just a few things that resulted from that breakup...
And we're only back down to three because of a (going on) five decade streak of executives that favor laissez-faire economics, which kind of proves my point that it's a good solution. Look at how much effort it took to undo that breakup, and they still haven't gotten back to the Ma Bell days.
I think that kind of disproves your point, but maybe we should just stop there. :-)
I think there are online business who are essential enough that some consumer protections are applicable. Very few reach the level of monopoly that utilities have in my mind, and even those it isn't clear to me that they are "natural" monopoly like utilities, and as such other antitrust approaches may be more beneficial.
However, I think there are a number of competitive, yet essential services online that deserve a legal protections regarding service termination. Identity providers absolutely fall in that category IMO - it is unacceptable for example for Facebook to lock your account in a manner that prevents you from not only using their services but every other third-party service which you authenticate using "Logon with Facebook". I think email is another that rises to this level. At a minimum email providers should be required to forward mail for a fixed period of time after choosing to stop doing business with a customer.
Part of that draft law pretty clearly states that companies must have a proper appeal process for banned accounts. This would apply to "decisions taken by the online platform on the ground that the information provided by the recipients is illegal content or incompatible with its terms and conditions", which in practice covers basically all bans except for Age restriction or non-payment based bans.
They must provide details of what part of the Terms of Service they claim you violated: "where the decision is based on the alleged incompatibility of the information with the terms and conditions of the provider, a reference to the contractual ground relied on and explanations as to why the information is considered to be incompatible with that ground".
If the internal appeals process fails, the consumer can take the company to online binding arbitration (with the consumer's choice of accredited arbitrators certified by the member state). The company always pays its own costs in the process, and must reimburse the user's costs if the company loses.
Google avoid this EU restriction by suspending accounts/app indefinitely instead of banning them.
You can see a Google employee explaining this here : https://github.com/moneytoo/Player/issues/37#issuecomment-76...
It isn't the only solution to this problem. Not using their products is another one. However, in some sectors (e.g. smartphones) it is next to impossible to not use their products, especially because they are build on centralized schemes. But regulating those things is probably harder than a consumer rights bill. But the downside is probably, that a consumer rights bill would not just affect the few large corporations, but many smaller ones too.
At that level, "percentage" is an insufficient measure. You want "permillionage", or maybe more colloquially "DPM" for "Defects Per Million" or even "DPB".
You'll still get false positives though, so you provide an appeal process. But what's to prevent the bad actors from abusing the appeal process while leaving your more clueless legitimate users lost in the dust?
(As the joke goes: "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists" [1])
Can you build any vetting process, and associated appeal process, that successfully keeps all the bad actors out, and doesn't exclude your good users? What about those on the edge? Or those that switch? Or those who are busy, or wary?
There's a lot of money riding on that.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/security_is_a...
Not that I disagree with your point, but even if we assume 50 billion accounts (6+ for every human on earth), 0.001% of that would still be 'just' 100k, not millions.
Fixed
Problem is: can we cultivate machine learning intelligence to be as good as some of the best human arbiters?
If a huge amount of wealth is created and 90% of it is captured and the vast majority of it is distributed in share price/dividends then increasing inequality can really fuck up society even while GPD rises.
Taken to its logical conclusion, when everything is automated, the people who own the automation don't actually need the rest of the population at all - it becomes redundant. Of course, the "redundant" population might have different ideas about itself...
I've had a problem with my Amazon account for years now, after Amazon billed me (on my seller account) for something they shouldn't have.
After I complained, they agreed to refund it. Except the refund never arrived.
Asked many times over the years "WTF?", and someone always promises to look into it after agreeing they can see the problem.
Never to be heard from again. Same pattern has happened every single time (many times). Obviously, something about it puts it in the "too hard" basket... :/
Needless to say, I don't use Amazon's services much at all any more unless required for job purposes. And I steer people away from AWS for the same reason too.
For those that don't know, phone companies are easily susceptible to sim-swapping attacks which can make it easy for an attacker to intercept SMS 2fa: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016212
Edit: looks like OP changed their entire comment while I was replying.
The Telcos never signed up to being a "secure verification code provider". Almost a decade ago, the local Telco industry group told us all:
"SMS is not designed to be a secure communications channel and should not be used by banks for electronic funds transfer authentication,"
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/telcos-declare-sms-unsafe-for...
Any company that uses SMS for 2FA is offloading risk and security to an industry that never expected it, and explicitly seeks to not provide it.
A Telco _desperately_ wants to be able to get you back up and running (making calls and spending money) on a new phone using your existing number before you walk out of the shop. And even more, they want to be able to transfer you across as a customer from a competitor - and have your existing number work on their network.
"Sim Swapping" is a valuable feature for Telcos. They have significant negative incentives to make it difficult. They don't want to secure your PayPal account, and nobody (least of all PayPal) should expect them to do a good job of it, certainly not for free...
No if you enforce your policies strictly by (machine learning) algorithms it could just be a matter of misinterpreting a different language, slang, irony or something else. Which makes these bans even more infuriating.
end users don't want to run their own spam and moderation filters, and they definitely do want them.
If every action taken against an account by automation is appealed, then the automation becomes worthless.
In gaming forums that are run by the developer, such as the World of Warcraft or League of Legends forums, I have very frequently seen people whining and complaining that their accounts were banned for no reason until a GM or moderator finally pipes in and posts chat logs of the user spamming racial slurs or some other blatant violation of ToS.
One thing I believe Microsoft gets right is that suspensions are isolated to the service whose TOS was violated. I.e. violating the hotmail TOS doesn't suspend you from their other services. I think this makes the impact of a false positive less catastrophic, while still removing actual problematic users from the service. This may be an artifact of how teams work together at Microsoft.
It's largely what made Facebook's forcing usage of their account for Oculus users so ass-backwards.
It may be an artifact of Microsoft actually being regulated for monopolistic practices.
I worked there for more than a decade. The settlement changed behavior - you thought about how to avoid future trust-like behavior.
At Google's scale and profitability, saying you can't build an appeals process that supports your paying users is just ridiculous. And at this point the collateral damage to Stadia's already tenuous reputation is going to be a lot more than paying someone to vet him manually.
Why banks have heavy compliance costs? Doing proper AML and KYC costs money and society decided that it was critical enough to bear that cost even in light regulation countries.
A lot of the financial success of those companies is in part the result of not fully taking responsibility for the consequences of their business activity. Eventually they will, under social pressure that this post success represent, or by laws.
Dividing a problem by 10 should get notice. By 100 (eg, Bloom Filters) respect. By 1000, accolades. Dividing a problem by infinity should be recognized for what it is: a logic error, not an accomplishment.
Most times when I'm trying to learn someone else's process instead of dictating my own, I'm creating lists of situations where the outcomes are not good. When I have a 'class', I run it up the chain, with a counter-proposal of a different solution, which hopefully becomes the new policy. Usually, that new policy has a probationary period, and then it sticks. Unless it's unpopular, and then it gets stuck in permanent probation. I may have to formally justify my recommendation, repeatedly. In the meantime I have a lot of information queued up waiting for a tweak to the decision tree. We don't seem to be mimicking that model with automated systems, which I think is a huge mistake that is now verging on self-inflicted wound.
Perhaps stated another way, classifying a piece of data should result in many more actions than are visible to the customer, and only a few classifications should result in a fully automated action. The rest should be organizing the data in a way to expedite a human intervention, either by priority or bucket. I could have someone spend tuesday afternoons granting final dispensations on credit card fraud, and every morning looking at threats of legal action (priority and bucket).
I'd use the total number of false positives as the proper measure.
Doesn't matter. If you're dealing with billions of accounts then you're earning billions of dollars. Just hire more people. Scale must never be an excuse for poor customer service.
Google has billions of accounts because it is FREE create them. Which could mean the cost of providing human support is actually too expensive on a per unit basis. The only way to rectify these economics is to charge for the account.
I pay for Google One to store more photos...however I have no clue if this improves my situation. Does the algorithm give me more slack for being a long, paid user? Do I get real customer support in the event I do get flagged? No clue.
From the user's perspective, it's still a pretty good deal. There's a 99.999% chance that you get to use gmail/youtube/etc for free. And a 0.001% chance that you'll end up a statistic, and need to pay a nominal fee for an appeal.
Unfortunately, I don't think the above will ever happen, because it would be a PR nightmare. "Google wants to charge you money, just to appeal a ban!" It's still better than the status quo, where people have almost no recourse when they are banned. But it still sounds way better in the media, if you just pretend as though these things never happen. Hence the status quo - use automated systems to cheaply get to a 99.999% success rate, and spend as little money as possible on the remaining 0.001%
And if companies don't want to do it, that should be easy to regulate though. Requiring a human centric appeal process even if it has a fee, and prohibiting blanket account bans (if you get banned on gmail it doesn't affect your android and play store accounts, for example)
There are other provisions that I consider important like not being able to reuse email addresses and requiring the forwarding of email for at least 6 months after any account termination (getting banned from your email address can have disastrous consequences)
The answer is to force google to be open and more transparent through regulations and have to scale up to deal with it and eat into their profits.
The assumption up front should not be that we need to care about protecting their profits.
They probably made a TON of money off of that, and off the credit protection services they offer directly or through subsidiaries.
It need not be, as long as the fee is less than the cost. It could be symbolic (say $1). But the problem is that it would be seen as a revenue generator whether it is or not.
Yes, it's pretty simple. Create and enforce some consumer protection laws which require, for example, that any company larger than a certain size is required to establish support offices staffed by humans in every major town. And required to resolve every issue within X days either by fixing the problem or clearly documenting why not. If not, no arbitration allowed, so they are subject to lawsuits if the reason doesn't hold scrutiny.
Problem solved. Companies like goog, facebook et.al. can easily afford this and it'll stop this ridiculous behavior.
It also to some extent protects the companies. Spambots who create a million accounts can't replicate a million humans to show up at the support office, so it establishes a human:human relationship that's completely missing today.
> Consider it burned. #Terraria for @GoogleStadia is canceled. My company will no longer support any of your platforms moving forward.
Of course, it's very difficult for small devs to do this. It takes an already solid business to be able to stand up like this. As always, I think this is the only way for Google to change, but I don't think it can happen.
Good example of standing up.
My impression from reports I've read about all the major App Stores is that they won't put much effort into processing violation notifications or takedown requests when the publisher or developer filing the complaint doesn't have an account of their own on the store - even less when they're banned (like how Terraria's devs were) - so it could be weeks or even months and the publisher of the knock-off or pirated copy gets to keep all the money they've made provided they've transferred it out of their payment account, I think?
Those would be easy to take down due to code/asset reuse and name reuse. You don't need to be an author on the platform to file DMCA reports. Otherwise, there are already lots of actual Terraria clones by different names.
They’ll have a ridiculously strong case.
If you sue a behemoth like Google or Amazon, they'll likely gladly make a settlement with you that's considerably greater than the actual damages because they value the NDAs and lack-of-PR damage from the inevitable Wall St. Journal headlines...
Same reason why you don't see knock offs on Playstation - the approval process is complex, very long and pretty costly.
But he won't pull Terraria from the Play Store I guess. Because he has no choice unless he wants to wreck his business.
The games are published by an indie game studio.
Normally this is done over an separate, non personal, account. Sometimes even multiple non personal accounts for multiple products.
So RE-LOGIC's Google account should not have been affected.
Also the revenue of the PC version should be roughly 4x all of the mobile versions combined (twice the amount of units sold, double the price).
Still there as of yet.
But maybe he means that he won’t be pushing any updates to Google Play?
Current Version 1.4.0.5.2.1
Updated December 8, 2020
Requires Android 4.4 and up
Time will tell I guess
Emphasis mine.
But isn't Terraria "complete" in the sense that maybe besides some bug fix there won't really be any updates anymore? (But potential successors to Terraria??)
Also given that it's about "moving forward" I highly doubt they will revert any existing support.
But their next game(s) might very likely not ship on Google Play (but potential alternative App stores).
In the end I guess their main marked is anyway Steam followed by the consoles (Switch, Playstation, XBox).
I just wonder if they sell more on GooglePlay or on the Apple App Store?
I agree with you. It certainly will be interesting to see how this works out...
It's likely that the primary devs have little to no control of that port, including the ability (and possibly ip rights) to take it down.
and
> "Google has already decided to cancel Stadia"
mean entirely different things. Of course people expect Stadia to get cancelled, but to claim they've already decided to cancel it is disinformation. It's a blatant lie. Don't spread fake news.
I believe you were going for hyperbole, but it reads more like misinformation instead. Please reconsider saying misleading shit like this, especially on HN.
the amount of people using Stadia that don't have access to a device that could play terraria is likely very small.
That's my personal take on the current situation: despite owning one of the largest digital store, Google sucks at being a publisher. The actual automated ban is mostly inconsequential. Every large publishers have technical issue from time to time. What's unique to Google is that you can't effectively contact anyone to have them sorted out.
If you are an indie dev with a track record and works with Steam, XBLA, Epic or Nintendo, you will be in touch with a company representative.
Do you mean with technology or something like "technically it could have worked in the market"? Because if its the latter then I disagree. Its a service on which my entire library can disappear, I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs). I have no idea who this is for.
Yes, I mean the technology. I played cyberpunk on it. It worked really well (better than I expected a streaming service to work).
> I have to pay full price + subscription price and maybe buy new hardware (to play on TVs).
You just need to pay the game to play in 1080p. The pro tier is if you want 4k and comes with free games. You can actually play free to play games like Destiny 2 for free on Stadia.
I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't know however. Google marketing was terrible.
This has to be the most bizarrely conceived product strategy ever. I know I am not a gamer, but... who is this targeting?
People playing tekken don't even like it when one of the players is on wifi, because the difference in response time changes the game. On Stadia its a non starter.
I played through Superhot and the best I can say is latency is impressive given it's beaming my inputs to a server, rendering, and beaming the frames back to me (though still not as good as just playing locally). But I had some horrible issues. Several play sessions had to end because my internet was being unreliable, as home internet tends to do. Not sure if someone started streaming Netflix or what, but that's kind of the issue -- I don't want someone else doing something on my network to be able to affect my gameplay session. Or if my ISP is just experiencing high traffic, or if the internet in my neighbourhood goes out, etc. There's so much that can and does go wrong, even if it's 99.9% reliable, that's not near enough for a video game.
Thankfully the game I was playing wasn't particularly time-sensitive, if it started lagging I could stop for a second and the game doesn't move forward (that's just how Superhot works, for anyone who isn't familiar). But I was seeing on the front page of the store you can buy Celeste and I just could not imagine playing a precision platformer like that with the bit of latency that exists, plus the possibility I get a lag spike and by the time it catches up I'm already dead and restarting the segment.
It's for Google, trying out rent-seeking in a consumer channel with high fixed costs
Yep. I worked for a small video game publisher with only four people in the entire company and we had a designated account representative at Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft we could (and did) contact when we had issues.
Might be harder as an indie dev, but if you have any track record, like you said, I'm sure they know someone they can contact.
Actual foreign developers who don’t speak English don’t have as much luck explaining themselves as indie irony-VN devs and can’t fix problems if Valve sees a picture of an anime and decides it was questionable sexual content when it wasn’t.
(Often it does still work out, some of the VNs had some really out there actual sexual content because they’re weirdos and the work was improved by removing it for Steam/Nintendo platform so
The difference is that now when they moderate, they call it something other than moderation and instantly permaban you and refuse to discuss it.
Valve definitely doesn't treat developers poorly (well their commission is too big but they are quite reasonable in how they interact with developers).
> They’re bad at dealing with Japanese content, if you get a reviewer who decides it’s “more gross anime shit” (as millenials like to do) they ban your game sight unseen with no appeal.
No, they don't do that. They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below). Also I don't think there is a millennial conspiracy regarding Japanese content. I'm French I have literally been raised on Japanese import and the content you are linking seriously creeps me out.
I'm including their own employees under game developers. There's various stories about people having to leave after trying and failing to get the company to actually make a game or ship any products lately.
> They ban games involving sexualisation of minors (e.g. your Twitter links below).
Dunno if the games contain that or not, all I can tell you is they don't have illegal content in the US. They certainly can ban whatever they want. The problem is they say they don't moderate the store, and they don't negotiate the not-moderation, so now you can't find out how to avoid it.
The developers are not criminals or trying to gross you out, but they do have weird fetishes and I think might be physically incapable of making something Westerners would be fine with without a lot of handholding. I mean, Jun Maeda seems to think he's doing a good job at writing women, but they all come out acting like they have an IQ of 10.
Another way to look at this: Valve's treatment of developers (not nearly as bad as Google, to be clear) is mostly tolerated because of Steam's inertia and market share. Google is acting like Stadia has inertia and market share when it has neither.
If any entity requires a huge amount of Twitter followers to get support, count me out.
Now, unless you are high follower count, they will reply asking you to DM and give you a hold.
Humans have been using social pressure to right wrongs.... for millenia.
Twitter is nothing more than a common social square.
* Legal stuff (eg. some algorithm detected child porn in his account, is an employee legally allowed to look at it to confirm the algorithm was correct? no.)
* Internal Politics (eg. one team has found this account DoSing their service, while the account is perfectly normal in all other ways, but due to Googles systems being so complex a single-service ban is very hard to implement)
* GDPR/Privacy laws (The law requires the deletion of no-longer needed data. As soon as his account gets banned, the data is no longer needed for Googles business purposes (of providing service to him), so the deletion process can't be delayed.
* Stolen/shared accounts. All it takes is one evil browser extension to steal your user account cookie and go on a spamming spree. Figuring out how it happened is near impossible (user specific logs are anonymized). Usually just resetting the users logins doesn't solve it because the malware is still on the users computer/phone and will steal the cookie again.
* Falsely linked accounts. Some spammers create gmail addresses to send spam, but to disguise them they link lots of real peoples accounts for example via using someone elses recovery phone number, email address, contacts/friends, etc. In many cases they will compromise real accounts to create all these links, all so that as many real users as possible will be hurt if their spamming network is shutdown.
* Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
* Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
Yes, it's solvable, and Google should put more effort into it, but it's hard to do.
Now that sounds like a technical problem that could be solved!
* You can be banned from Google Pay and all payment based services, yet still have a Google account which works for free services. There are lots of gnarly corners and bugs for users in this category, since any call to a billing API will fail. Want to use google Meet for a video call? You can't because that calls Google Voice to check your balance for phone calls, and that fails... You can end up on this list if your bank tells Google that they have evidence of committing fraud for example.
* Adwords can be banned separately. Usually done for accounts who abuse the "$100 of promotional credit" things... Prevents use of paid chat in youtube as a side effect.
* Various Youtube features can be banned separately from the account. Used for copyright strikes etc. Causes side effects like for example Google photos can't sync videos as part of an android backup because it's the same backend and rules.
Of course, there's some stuff you can disable that completely breaks how you'd expect e.g. Android integration to work with that account.
This is simply wrong since the account is always "banned" and not "deleted". So the data is still there, not providing it is going against GDPR. Evidence for this is all the accounts that were unbanned and still had their data. Make the account read-only for all I care but don't think for a second that this data has to be deleted immediately (It definitely does not, there are reasons and reasonable ways for data to be retained for some time)
> * Untrustable employees. Google tries not to trust any employee with blanket access to your account. That means they couldn't even hire a bunch of workers to review these accounts - without being able to see the account private data, the employee wouldn't be able to tell good from bad accounts.
But somehow accounts get unbanned if they get enough attention... so this does not seem to be a problem.
> * Attacks on accounts. There are ways for someone who doesn't like you to get a Google account banned. Usually there are no logs kept (due to privacy reasons) that help identify what happened. Example method: Email someone a PDF file containing an illegal image, then trick them into clicking "save to drive". The PDF can have the image outside the border of the page so it looks totally normal.
So simultaneusly you can look at the image to ban the account but can't look at it to unban it? I get that the first one is done by algorithms and the second one presumably is not but calling this a privacy issue is laughable since you don't have to look at the content in the first place.
All of your points don't adress the issue of "The user does not even know why he was banned" at all. Luckily there are EU laws in the pipeline for that.
Having 10 highly paid long-tenured engineering employees who can look at small parts of a users account data is clearly better than having 10,000 call center workers be able to access user private data.
The end result is high profile incidents get handled in a way that it would be too risky to do for everyone.
Even with the small pool of engineers, there are incidents[1] where user data is used inappropriately. Would you make this pool larger?
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineer-stalked-teen...
I don't see why all the reasons above mean basic transparency can't happen.
> Sadly this would make the system utterly trivial to gamify
There is a reasonable middle ground that would make gamification harder and at the same time satisfy less abusive users. You can disclose the sanction immediately, would need to add a short but variable delay before disclosing the underlying reason, to prevent abusing from abusing the system repeatedly.
This is a solved problem - you just have to be willing to realise that magic AI sprinkles aren’t the answer.
As for cost - this continual stream of screwups is costing them a ridiculous amount of goodwill and future business. It’s probably the best ad for AWS there is.
Google chooses this path, it’s not forced on them.
That's absolutely not how GDPR works.
Only seems to be an issue for companies like Google who ideologically don't provide any way to talk to a human and escalate. Amazon manages to have some of the best customer service in the world while operating on similar scales with far more things that can go wrong.
There is no excuse.
If you had experience with this, you would know that you just described the polar opposite of how that process works in the United States. Federal law requires human verification as part of the mandatory NCMEC reporting process. If you’re employed by Google and have that impression of how it works it means the green badges doing the work aren’t known to you, which isn’t a huge shock since TVCs are barely one step above disposable barcode at Google.
Source: I’ve forensically verified enough child exploitation in the course of tech employment to make me thoroughly and irredeemably despise humanity as a species. (Fighting insurance to pay for therapy I now need, against their will, was fun too.)
Child porn detection and enforcement literally does not work that way. I'm not sure how you even think that would work. How do you think the algorithm gets trained? Humans feed data into it. All the major social media companies (Facebook, etc) have paid human moderators that have to screen flagged content in many cases to determine whether it is illegal and then escalate to the relevant staff or authorities, and in some cases this is a legal requirement.
The GDPR one is especially ridiculous. Why would you be required to delete a user's data the moment you suspend their account? That's utterly absurd, it completely eliminates the user's recourse in the event of an error. No reasonable human being would interpret the laws that way and the relevant regulators (yes, GDPR is enforced by humans) would never require you to do that.
Google already has measures to deal with malware on machines, typically temporary or permanent bans of the hardware and/or IP address. They don't have to permanently delete your gmail account to lock out Chrome on a single malwared PC. If you've ever done any automation or browsed on a shared network you've probably seen Google Search throw up the 'automated traffic' warning and block you for a bit.
Being able to review conduct of an account (i.e. browse logs) is not "blanket access to your account" and neither is being able to examine the details on why the account was banned and reverse them. The account owner could also authorize the employee to access their data - any time you talk to a Customer Service representative for a company, you're doing this.
Normally that happens to me when I start to adjust my query to get Google to do what it used to do.
1. Ignore the downvotes. The reality (poor customer service perception) is what it is. Objectively looking at the problem and what can be done about it, without cynically assuming it's impossible, is the most practical focus going forward. Thanks very much for this insight, it was really interesting to read.
2. I've noticed various glitches and bugs over the years with various services - two I can remember right now are a) misspelling a search then clicking "did you mean" won't update the titlebar (been watching this one since ~2012), and b) accidentally sending an in-progress draft from one device will cause followup edits made on another device to sent to /dev/null. Well... I look at the kind of time-wasting junk input that makes it into Issue Tracker, I look at random app feedback, etc, and I know my feedback is never going to be seen. I can understand why things need to impact 10K people to be noticed. I thought I'd ask you: what's a good recommendation here?
3. Extremely specific question that I happen to be worrying about at the moment :) - I wasn't sure which Google account I wanted to use to play with GCP some months ago so I ended up enabling billing on more than one account using the same card. I have an idea I'd like to play which would call for a new account (since it would be tied to a YouTube channel) and would require me to use the same card yet again. All of this would be staying within the free tier, but I still wonder if I shouldn't run data takeouts first...? (I can't deny that the current state of Google services feels a bit like Russian roulette with extra servings of superstition - what doesn't kill your account, makes it stronger, or something??)
I do not think GDPR works like that. You can absolutely store information pertaining to "why" questions because that is still a service they will be providing. Also, whenever they restore some's service they give data back. So they have obviously not deleted the data.
Does anyone recommend any alternate providers with custom domains, or some OSS? Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
You can use fastmail, or if you don't want to lose Gmail's UI you can use GSuite which lets you use a personal domain name.
It's not only this issue with Google being like a wall when things happen, but also that I dislike their semi-AI based interface. While I like their good spam filter, there's a lot of other stuff going on there, and that without any inbox rules that I have set up.
It is a docker based email server setup very well done.
More recently though I moved my personal domain to Microsoft Exchange Online - it's a lot less flexible than Mailcow (per-head licensing, but there's + addressing and catch-alls now) but I don't have any of the deliverability/gmail-spam-folder issues I used to have.
Exchange P1 Online [2] is roughly the same for my single-user as my old DO droplet cost per month
(edit: side-bonus you get an Azure AD tenant for your domain which is handy for SSO/IdP things)
[2]: https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/microsoft-365/exchange/compa...
It's absolutely possible to host your own e-mail server on VPS. You'll receive mail without issues. But sending mail might cause issues, so unless you're OK with some delivery problems and spending some time to investigate, I don't suggest going that route.
Hosting your email on NAS is problematic. You need to have static IP address with PTR record and most home providers won't offer those services for reasonable price.
With the complete lack of accountability, support, or recourse the giants seem to have, it has never been more important to not put all one's eggs in one basket.
I'm happy with Namecheap as my registrar and Mailbox.org for mail services, and have been for years (my Gmail account still exists and forwards the rare message it receives to the other one).
Mailbox.org offers ordinary IMAP and SMTP access + DKIM signing for your domain. Hosted in Germany. Prices vary, I pay about €2/month for several GB I think.
Their webmail interface is bad, but then again, I've never seen one that isn't. And I've never used it after logging in for the first time anyway.
> Is it possible to host your own email server on a NAS or RPi something?
It's possible, but I wouldn't recommend it for something as critical as email. It's not that the actual hosting is hard, it's that more and more of the big providers are refusing to handle email messages from certain networks.
Both have unpleasant web accessibility experience, but it is not consideration for many.
* Respect the user
* Respect the opportunity
* Respect each other
The first one is obviously a joke, because nothing says "respect the user" like canceling a beloved service with millions of users, or "updating" the product while losing half the features.
The last one makes you wonder why they had to put it into a slogan. Isn't it the baseline expectation? It's somewhere on the level of "Don't steal your colleague's belongings" as far as slogans go.
But it's the second one that is absolutely the best, and by that, I mean the worst. Orwell would've had a lot to say about it. The thing is, it has absolutely no meaning in the English language. What's next? Say hi to agility? Don't offend capital gains? Console excellence?
Of course, it doesn't really matter. The whole thing has a mafia vibe, as Google's slogans and culture are drifting towards loyalty rather than standing up for what's right.
--------
If you want to have more fun, look at Google's Community Guidelines[1]
Compare to The Mafia Code:
* Be loyal to members of the organization. Do not interfere with each other's interest. Do not be an informer.
--[Google: Treat our data with care. Don't disseminate NTK information.]
* Be rational. Be a member of the team. Don't engage in battle if you can't win.
--[Google: follow Three Values, in particular: Respect the opportunity.]
* Be a man of honor. Respect womanhood and your elders. Don't rock the boat.
--[Google: Do your part to keep Google a safe, productive, and inclusive environment for everyone.]
* Be a stand-up guy. Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.
--[Google: Discussions that make other Googlers feel like they don't belong have no place here.]
* Have class. Be independent. Know your way around the world.
--[Google: You are responsible for your words and your reach.]
The rest is literally copy-pasted, Ctrl+F is your friend.
Honestly, this reads like a Rule of Acquisition. I think Google may be run by Ferengi at this point.
Nobody cares about "changing the industry" if it doesn't "move the needle". And in the end, the needle is neither the number of users, nor the positive impact of the project.
Including that doesn't help your argument much. And apart from "do not be an informer" and "don't rock the boat" the mafia code is pretty much unarguably good advice. Employees should be following it.
We'd all be better off if everyone was rational, honourable, independent and classy.
The Mafia Code isn't bad because it has bad stuff.
The Mafia Code is bad because it doesn't prohibit awful stuff.
The Mafia Code says nothing about being not evil, or, for that matter, not killing your enemies, not extorting non-mafia people, and so on.
It's all about being loyal to, and protecting the interests of the Family.
Which is what Google aims to be - one big family, which will take care of all your needs, as long as you follow the code.
If you want to argue that Google is promoting these values amongst it's employees that is fine; but that is a great idea on Google's part. It isn't strengthening your argument.
Now as far as "the user", well the joke is apparently on GP, as everybody and their dog knows that 'on the internet, if the product is free, you are the product and not the user!'. Even dogs on internet know this, but alas, HN has forgotten. So, "respect the user" means respect the folks who are paying us to track everybody and their dog on the internet.
Respect "the opportunity". Translation: This is a "Golden Time' for the few to lord it over the many! So the respect the user, and respect each other, and the rest should be grateful for having 'the permission' to use our platform.
Hope this helps.
Towards other Mafia people.
Which is a key point. People who aren't in the Family have different opinions of people on the other side of the tommy gun barrel and its humane usage.
Also no programmer had anything to say how bad it is. In a software company...
Neither Google's new nor its old slogans are good according to this criterion.
Citation needed. This seems like an arbitrary criterion to me.
"Do not be evil" was a good slogan.
If you aren't giving something else up, then you aren't saying anything. It's just platitudes.
"Do not be evil" is basically meaningless as a lot of evil is done with the intention of doing good. With that level of ambiguity, it is entirely down to individual interpretation.
But most of all, the user is still the product.
Unless by user they mean "the advertiser".
From the perspective of an AI moderation system, all you have to do to be perfectly internally consistent is to ban all accounts that raise any flags.
Friend Computer sees no Conflict if one is no longer a Citizen, because being in Conflict with the Computer is Treason.
Now they are the establishment. Their power and influence is on par with the US government, so it's an expectation that they should actually not be evil. But they fail at that in the most basic ways and they're not held accountable for it because "they're a private company, they can do what they want!"
For example, Google got a lot of flack for literally tracking its users' every move whether or not they consent to do so[1].
Is it "respectful"? Is that "the right thing"? You can justify everything by the value that Google provides.
But it's, you know... kind of evil.
Sadly, this not something one could refer to anymore in a meeting discussing this issue.
[1]https://apnews.com/article/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
No it has always been the same company, and we tried to tell you.
Get an email address that you own, on a domain you control. Switch to a provider that takes your money for whom you are the customer - not the product.
I did this with Fastmail and Iki.fi, a Finnish non-profit[1], who have been selling people "permanent" email addresses since 1995.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20171113150544/https://getstream...
Wow, didn't know this story. Imperialism at its finest from the Anglo-saxon world (well, actually started by the French with slavery but that was >200 years ago, I found way worse the decisions took 50 years ago).
That said, there are ccTLDs which behave more like gTLDs (like .io, .me, .fm, .gg, .cd) and are treated as such across much of what you do online, but whether that'll impact your email delivery depends on who you communicate with and how they treat spam.
That's not strictly true - British Indian Ocean Territory has permanent inhabitants, just not any native ones (never had had them, really - it was uninhabited until 1793). US military Diego Garcia base is there...
It's bullshit for other reasons, and expulsion of Chagossians to build the base is a tragedy - but not due it being empty territory (it's not).
There is a different danger however — after about 8 years the annual fee went from about $15 to $60.
That is exactly the point krageon is making. If you have a .so domain (or .earth like me), you need to have a backup at least, so you can still access things like a normal human. My @gmail.com address have been used for this, but seems I'm gonna have to get yet another domain with a normal tld so I can stop using the gmail one for when .earth is not correctly accepted.
I've had the same .org domain for around 15 years now. Except for the coup we've seen last year where somebody tried to buy it privately (thankfully averted, I believe), I've see no price hike over time.
That part is probably not a good bet, as life can go in unexpected directions.
Some country providers (eg .eu) only provide service to their citizens, so if you move country or otherwise become "not a citizen" they'll terminate your domain. As happened recently to the UK holders of .eu domains. :/
Probably better to pick a .net/.com/.org domain, for (hopefully) longer term stability.
Also .org falls under US influence, which may not have worked out so well had you been making this decision in Ukraine a decade ago
Very much agreed on .org.
[0] https://www.iana.org/domains/root/db/eu.html [1] https://eurid.eu/en/register-a-eu-domain/brexit-notice/
Ahhh, hadn't realised that. Though I'd suspect .com and .net would be in the same position as .org in that respect.
* Not to mention phishing. Is that link going to foobank dot com or foobank dot club?
Google now sells domains, as well as email through GSuite.
I use them a lot on new projects, because I find them so insanely convenient, but I can't help shake the feeling that now I'm both the product and a paying customer.
So I'd probably nuance your words with: "select a provider whose livelihood depends on your custom".
If you buy a domain through Google, you should still be able to transfer it to another registrar.
And do NOT register it through a provider whose only support is Machine Learning!(tm).
You can the use whatever service you want. G Suite, Exchange Online, roll your own, …
I've used both over the years, though the EasyDNS UI is a bit harder to work with. They seem more technically competent than Hover though, who are decent but not fantastic. ;)
Actually, I've been thinking about doing the same thing.
But i don't know much about emails.
I go through the filter every now and then to see which services are still using my old address and change them to use the newer one.
It's also a nice way to find out how horribly some services have f-d up the change process. One had a non-working change email button and the CS rep just deleted my old account and told me to create a new one.
One just plain doesn't let people change their email. At all.
But I still use my old gmail for one thing: Point of contact for the my domain registrar. Do you have any suggestions for how I can solve this?
A second hosted email domain has an additional benefit - it allows you to also control your recovery (secondary) email, such as you'd add to your banking/financial website, etc. and not have any of your email options where they can be taken away like this post. It's trivial to have one of the email hosted providers do an IMAP pull from your GMail account, so you can still keep it around just manage it as an external account (such as for your Android login needs).
With it, I have email from multiple domains doing what I want. I also have a <username>@fastmail.fm which has only been provided to one person: my domain registrar.
If you pay someone to handle your email this is a good approach, IMO.
Some email providers have IMAP import, where you just give them the password and they'll do it for you. Not the best solution in terms of security but might be ok if you're getting rid of your account anyway.
It gives you all of your mail in mbox format, which is a common format.
For me it's google photos. While there are lot of great gmail alternatives these days there's still nothing like google photos unfortunately, is there?
If you are looking for a managed solution, I suggest one of those that you pay for (iCloud, Dropbox, OneDrive) since usually, paid services have at least some form of customer service and something like OP's story is less likely to happen.
[1] Also, the cloud provider where I rent the server might decide to block my account for whatever reason. To minimise the risk, I'm planning to store daily server backups on a different cloud provider.
I dont have a mac at the moment but have a iphone. Their windows application is very bad, unreliable sync and their web interface is missing a lot of functionality. No linux integration at all, but that is expected.
Onedrive works well for file sync but almost have no photo library + editing functionality.
I still have my google accounts, I just don’t use them (except YouTube unfortunately). My gmail still forwards to my new address, but I mostly just get emails where people got their own addresses wrong nowadays.
What I did was: I registered a domain name from a company that i don’t use for anything else besides domain names (incidentally a local registrar who I trust and can call on the phone). I then set up a new email address (I use fastmail) using that domain name. Then I forwarded all my old emails to this new address.
If someone emailed my old address, I would always reply from my new one, which slowly updated peoples address books. If I got newsletters, I would either unsubscribe and resubscribe from my new one or just unsubscribe. I did that very slowly and it took a year or so before I stopped getting any forwarded, but there’s no rush. Don’t think “oh I have to update everything at once”. Similarly, I updated services that I still use that used the old email to log in on a case by case basis as I used them.
You can ditch google and it’s not as hard as it sounds!
Things aren't all-or-nothing, and taking this sort of approach can definitely help with making such a non-trivial change.
So at least I could redirect my accounts to a new address if worst happens.
I’ve been trying to switch off gmail for a while but spam filtering is really hard for me.
It's not perfect, and I'm thinking more and more about moving to a paid service, but this at least gives me some peace of mind that if one day I run afoul of Google's AI bouncers, I won't lose a decade of info overnight.
But Google (and Facebook, and probably some other companies) don't have reasonable processes for disputing or resolving these situations.
Some have said that we should consider Google's challenge: lots of users/activities that need to be monitored and policed. The assumption is that Google could not afford to do this "reasonably" with humans instead of automated systems because the volume is high.
But Google certainly could hire and train humans to follow a process for reviewing and assisting in resolving these cases. They don't. It is doubtful that they cannot afford to do this; I haven't checked their annual report lately, but I'm guessing they still have a healthy profit.
In the unlikely event that involving more humans would be too expensive, then Google should raise their prices (or stop giving so much away for free).
To summarize, there is no excuse for Google to operate this way. They do because they can, and because the damage still falls into the "acceptable losses" column.
Edit: I'm not defending Google's actions in the case of the Terraria developer's account or any other. I'm saying there are some people who have an axe to grind and right now they are the loudest voices. IMHO Google needs to counteract that by taking real action at a broad scale.
At some point the trolls will win for no other reason than inaction on Google's part.
Question, does take-out still work with a banned account?
No clue, my friend; I am not a Google employee.
No, because banned (not merely "suspended", which you can fix using google tools) accounts are usually banned because of bad content.
Yeah, until they piss off someone too big to not give up without a legal/public fight or they piss enough people to make a dent on their bottom line.
I think Google right now is just coasting and the short term evolution is just reactive/siloed plans but no bigger picture of where they want to go (basically just "evolution for promotion points")
Big ass tech company been around for ages saying it’s gonna change the world.
All you do is coast. Like what. Could you imagine going back in time and saying that to folks? That their whole “I’m gonna change the world” routine is going to be given up on?
They didn't "do" anything.
Google will be forgotten the same way any company that rides off coattails does.
Google changed the world - you legit made me spit my drink that's such a fucking joke. They were the search engine that went big
The big plans are cloud/youtube. Smaller plans are things like Nest, Pixel, Stadia, etc. Web ads will take care of itself indefinitely.
There are always moonshots in flight but it's non-trivial to create a second trillion dollar business out of thin air.
They have absolutely been coasting, and the market is only getting more cutthroat.
Don't hold your breath. Didn't Google/Youtube recently ban the sitting President of the United States who is also a billonaire and notoriously litigious?
They didn't have exactly what you wanted so provided a workaround that would solve the problem.
I have never heard anyone say that the AWS toolset was anything but "an amalgam of individual projects developed separately." It is obvious from their UI that the different tools are run by different teams that have very different opinions on how things should be done. Just look at the various iterations of deployment management. ECS vs Lambda vs EKS vs classic EC2. All the UIs have different design standards and assumptions. It has gotten better over the years, but the AWS org chart is still peaking through the UI.
GCP is not much better. At least they had the advantage of starting later in the market cycle. They were able to see what worked and what didn't work at AWS and build a bit cleaner.
In the end we are talking about B2B systems targeting power user engineers. The control surfaces need to be powerful first, and easy to use is a distant second or third consideration.
Yes? If you can't trust your rep to give accurate recommendations, then what's the point of even having one?
If you have no problems, it's fine. The first time you need to call customer support, you start wondering if TMobile or somebody else would be a better provider.
On that note - I have AT&T. I'm fine with AT&T, except that group MMS / messaging is broken with non-iPhone users. I've tried calling support, walking into a store, and now - simply given up. I tried two other carriers a few years ago, and had far worse problems, so I just suck it up and call people when we have to communicate. At least that part works.
You sum it up well.
https://tedpiotrowski.svbtle.com/switched-to-verizon-iphone-...
Google is AT&T: technically great, but customer support is intentionally and aggressively incompetent.
AWS is Verizon: technically good with some weird rough edges and legacy stuff, but customer support will bend over backwards for you.
Does that mean Azure is T-mobile? I have little experience with either.
Google, on the other hand, pretends to be a good provider of lots of software services, but if anything ever goes wrong with any of them, you are screwed, including if it's a premium service that you pay for. This is why you should never allow Google to control anything that is important to a business of yours or to your personal life.
Google has tons of sales reps on the ad side who will be happy to give you a rationale on why you should spend money more aggressively on their platform, but even they will sometimes be useless at fixing problems unless you are a truly massive customer for them. If you ever need to talk to a sales rep, you can get a Google ad person on the phone in minutes, but they will tell you to bid more aggressively and to buy more display ads.
If your problem with Google is that you aren't spending enough money on display ads, they're Johnny on the spot; they've got 9 trillion hammers that they want to sell you for that particular nail. Need help with anything else substantial related to a Google service? We have a robot you can e-mail for that, and that robot will ignore you.
When AWS first arrived they had the same automated support system that Google does, and they didn’t really want to comply with GDPR. We probably would’ve gone with Azure anyway because it’s the easy option for operations when you’re already in bed with 365, but the Amazon/Google attitude meant they weren’t even considered beyond the first look.
Since then AWS has overtaken Azure in GDPR compliance and the availability of their support, and we now have several supplier operated solutions in AWS.
Google is still on the “do not buy from this company” list.
But maybe they just aren’t interested. They are primarily an advertising company after all.
A couple years ago, there was an update that affected a bunch of embedded devices and caused some machines to go down. Luckily our machines were on an older version, but another shop we worked with got hit by it.
Within an hour of Microsoft being alerted to the issue they'd begun working on the problem and within two hours machines were back up and running again after Microsoft pushed an update.
The cumulative time if took them to read and answer all of those emails (and cost) was definitely double that of just shipping the $1 part.
Only in the vaguest sense. Don't attribute to corporate greed what can be adequately explained by an out-of-control bureaucracy made of competing personal interests and baroque by leadership by committee on promotions and raises.
Writing a fast computer program is much easier than designing a good bureaucracy.
I already use Google's paid-tier for their storage and I use their domain registrar.
I get that I'm using a free product so that means they have to do customer service on the cheap. I get it. I'm happy to give something that's mission-critical in my life mission-critical payment without the pain of migrating to a new email provider.
Shut up and take my money, Google.
Looking it over, I didn't realize the Google One product offers human support options, so... maybe hypothetically I could actually get service if my account was shuttered? Or they'll actually be resistant to shuttering my account?
I didn't know about Stadia. I had been thinking of getting it, partly out of curiosity. Now I won't bother.
In 2 of those cases, they were high-6 & low-7 figure follower companies and were spending well into the 6 figures per year on facebook ads. They were both ultimately overturned after escalating via an "agency-only" facebook person who looked into it and found it to be automated violations (both the original and the appeal!). The excuse for why it wasn't overturned upon appeal was "Sorry we cannot disclose this since people would game the system if we did" yet a single person manually reviewed and overturned it in a matter of minutes.
I don't understand the (successful) business logic that gets Facebook into a scenario like this where you can't put 1 hour of human capital into reviewing a potentially million dollar contract.
I created instagram filters this cycle for a client which I thought would be really cool; I haven't seen any from campaigns beyond the Biden Aviators (I work in politics). I wanted to do a 'i just voted' type challenge; tried many ideas and combinations like swappable campaign buttons without text showing 'issues,' branding, different voting method 3d objects.
Facebook kept rejecting and pointing to policy that clearly did not apply to what I was uploading.
I wish they would have just said 'we don't want political filters.' Escalating to actual @fb employee emails did not work. We're not important enough.
If they say something is not allowed, at least one group will claim they are suppressing free speech. But if they allow it, they end up having to allow some misleading or completely false disinformation.
That is most of politics....
For what it's worth the ads do have more docs on what ads are accepted.
-- Going off the rails here but you brought it up (i am GP?), I'm actually pissed ads aren't back up!!!
It's hindering our business (enough to hurt), preventing fundraising, and really hurts smaller campaigns.
However from my (Dem) perspective I do think FB should act like TV stations and fact check.
One study in my city said 1 minute of fact check for every 160 minutes of ads (I think i remember that roughly correct).
I also especially had beef with the super weak 'projected winner' banner on posts with Biden/Trump post election. It compounded the lie. Projected gives a false sense of 'up in the air.'
They knew that Trump and MAGA media are using nonsense to lie to people. It ended up with insurrection at the capitol.
They should have called Biden the winner -> link to the facts. Most media went beyond projected after a few days.
They again should have also followed the rest of the media by adding another few words to combat the lies from MAGA once they continued and escalated: all lawsuits got thrown out with prejudice the election is not contested.
NyTimes et al use language like baseless, 'Mr. Trump's lie', unfounded. They now go further and use words like extreme, conspiracy, 'cult figure.'
They'd waste 99% of their time with spammers, scammers, and attackers trying to social engineer account access. There's no reason to waste a human's time on that.
Make the support request cost $250-$500. Guarantee a human on the other end. That drops spam/scam attempts down to basically nothing. It also helps cover the cost of providing real review. Plus, $500 is a very reasonable expense for most companies (basically negligible for all but the smallest), and it's a high bar for scams/spam.
Basically - No, your answer is not a valid reason to not provide human based support.
So charge them less? Now the scammers will call from those places.
How does msft handle support contracts from customers in the developing world?
As far as I know it's priced the same. In the context of this discussion - A business to business relationship - $500 is pretty reasonable at a global level.
For an individual consumer - I think $500 is a fairly steep price even in the US (and other 1st world countries) and that's by design.
Google is already wasting 'a human's time' - but its the user. When a user is banned, an enormous amount of time is wasted trying to re-register their new email with every single website, service, bank, etc - at times talking to a human to fix things. And that is the best case. The worst case is that their livelihood is affected - app developer, youtuber, etc.
The status-quo needs to change - and Google should provide better service. It doesn't really matter if they hire more humans or not.
In a setting where advertisers are effectively forced to use Google to avoid giving market share to competitors, there's the element of not having a choice while ending up with a significant disadvantage once these mechanisms falsely trigger.
With Google being the operator of the platform and judge at the same time, I don't think they can hide behind terms of use in all jurisdictions. Scaling up without carrying the costs involved seems pretty unjustified.
Some people would call that racketeering.
People might be afraid of lawyers but they aren’t involved in these processes.
The problem isn't that it's hard, but that it's a cost center instead of a profit center.
Without a human to contact, you have no recourse. The email that you received denying your request for re-evaluation is no-reply@big.co, so you're stuck. It is a surprisingly awful feeling of helplessness. In fact, if a human on the other end of the phone were to say, "I'm sorry, it doesn't say why, but our system won't let you back in.", you would probably feel a little better because some soul heard you.
- They bought google wireless. - Their charge was declined, whatever the reason, they wanted to correct that. Or possibly an accidental dispute. - Google disabled their account because of non-payment - Google's customer support couldn't help because they weren't a paying customer. - They literally couldn't do ANYTHING because google was ignoring every step of the way. - Their account was blocked from making any payments and couldn't contact someone until they made a payment. - Eventually their phone was disabled, and they lost the phone number because... no payment!
And once the phone number was released / re-used there was nothing they could do.
Same thing if Google was to ban my gmail today, I'd lose SO MUCH and worse is my photos, all my logins, etc. Their "loss" on me could be devastating to my life and not even a blip on their radar.
Just curious, why would you accept this risk? Even though the probability of losing your account is small, the impact is huge. I'd recommend at least backups and your own domain for an E-mail address (even if you just have Gmail continue to host the email).
I also do regular Google Takeout backups so that I at least have access to the majority of emails and google data.
I have considered this, but converting is not risk free. Say I utilize my own domain backed by Gmail. I have increased my surface area by being reliant upon both Google and the security of my domain registrar. Perl.com was just stolen[0] due to some shenanigans -how I would I keep myself immune?
My fear with using my own domain is that if it is compromised, then an attacker can access all of my email linked accounts (eg banking). If Google shuts me down, at least I know the domain is secure and the email is dead and unable to be intercepted.
Banks use 2FA so stealing your email won't steal your account.
Anyway, you can appeal to the registrar and IANA for help if your registration is attacked.
I've yet to find a good solution for this without paying for Google's business product, which I find way too dangerous to risk. You can't get a custom domain on consumer gmail.
Anyway why is Google's paid business product more risky than their free Gmail?
1. You need to pay for a mail server, and then you lose the benefits of gmail's spam filters, and also you start having deliverability problems.
2. You lose the benefits of some of gmail's features as they don't classify forwarded emails the same.
Because as a person I have some rights under GDPR, as a business I don't really. Business accounts are even easier for them to shut, and using a business account for personal things sets off loads of red flags. You can't review products, you can use family features, your google home products get messed up, etc.
I have a monthly calendar reminder to do a GDPR export (Google Takeout, Facebook, etc), and I just save it to a big HDD. I keep the instructions to order exports for each service in the "event description" to make it as quick and as little effort for me as possible.
I know it's boring... but I read the article this thread is about and it just re-inforces that I am doing the right thing.
... Probably as many as currently pay for Youtube Premium and then come to HN and complain about ads on Youtube :)
That was more than 12 years ago, and there has been a steady stream of incidents like that one. If you're still using a Google account for critical stuff, you know what you're getting yourself into.
It's almost like they could, I don't know, have some AI ethics researcher who could explain to them the pitfalls of letting a bunch of programmers act like their algos are infallible and suggest how to avoid those pitfalls.
Nah, just kidding. You sack her for being an uppity black lady who won't just churn out reports saying Google are perfect, because it hurts the feelings of the programmers and their managers.
There's a difference between someone with a Gmail account who added a card to GCP and spun up a VM, and a business with a business account. Google support isn't there for the former, but there's plenty of it for the latter.
That’s the bar.
I'd also say that it's not a particularly useful end of the market. If I were to judge a cloud provider purely on their "day 1" experience I'd just go to Digital Ocean, it's far better than AWS at that level.
You just add "support contract" on that credit card (without it, AWS is just as likely to ignore you too)
I love Google Cloud for its technology, but their support needs improvement.
Would I start any new business on GVP? Never, now, because I would be scared that they just change something that breaks my app because they can.
That may be true, but many people won't even try it to find out because "Google" itself is synonymous with "customer service black hole". They should have given their cloud product a name other than "Google", similar to how Microsoft named their offering "Azure" and not "Microsoft Cloud" - if Microsoft (the name) has bad rep, they can just drop that moniker to preserve their cloud offering as simply "Azure".
hold my datacenter
Do they have to honor the SLA if you are doing stuff against their ToS or if you were hosting illegal content?
I'm pretty sure they can and will shut your account off if they think you are being naughty, that's the problem with AI making decisions. The reasons are good enough.
I'm saying this as a heavy GCP user. What we did are the usual recommendations, have an extra owner for the projects as a fallback (not a fake backup account for the love of god, someone real and trustworthy). Buy your domains somewhere else. Have backups/replication outside Google's reach. Have a doomsday scenario plan to bring everything up.
It also helps that we're one of the largest telcos.
Google has humans, but only for contracts big enough.
Support was hit and miss:
- once 2 actual engineers, onsite, recreating problems
- another time: some hapless, bottom of the barrel support technicians who must have been following a script similar to the old "have you turned on and off your modem"-scripts from early internet days. No clue whatsover.
- another time, some brass tuning in, promising a fix in next rollout. Didn't happen.
Now if only they could figure it out for consumer accounts... Those are customers as well and deserve to be treated as such.
Once including waking up people in Mountain View on weekend.
Yes, it is the problem of Google executives, not of "Google". Fish rots from the head. Google has rotten upper management. That's why the middle management runs like drunk frat boys allowing for this kind of behavior downstream.
Amazon might be slightly better than Google with regards to finding a person to speak with, but, not any better with finding a person who can do anything when you've been wronged.
That said, it seems that "Amazon" and "AWS" have entirely separately run customer service organizations. I have no reason to believe GCP customer relationships are managed in anyway resembling the way they manage their cattle on their free services where the user is the product anyway. Why would they?
I'm certain GCP has separate support, otherwise they wouldn't be able to compete with AWS.
Fundamentally, Google has spent its credibility with this crowd, and that’s not something that can be reasoned against. What Google needs to do is put the effort in to re-earn trust, which it clearly is not doing.
From the comments:
> Because of a keyword monitor picked up by their auto-moderation bot our entire project was shut down immediately
We do disaster recovery and analysis all the time. And, not just dumb-brain "well, this is what their policies say happens", but real-world "this is what we're reading around social media, use-cases, blog posts, etc". This Terraria situation has already made the rounds in our slack DR channels.
We pulled off G-Suite about a year ago due to their stance on privacy, and concerns that the corporate firewall of G-Suite may not be as strong as they want you to believe, intentionally or not. Account lockout issues are also, obviously, a secondary concern.
Google Enterprise/Workspace/Cloud/etc needs to be separated from Google. At this point, I am blown away that their investors haven't begun to demand it. I understand that they may look at it as a new revenue growth area for the whole company, but frankly, this is flat-out wrong. These conversations are happening in nearly every technology-oriented enterprise. Google cannot be trusted, not by consumers, not be enterprises. Google proper is a cultural liability to the actually strong products their enterprise divisions put out.
The last time I used TOR it was almost impossible to do anything on the internet. Every Google search was met with "We detected you are a bot" and every website interaction was blocked by never-ending CAPTCHAs.
It's definitely not the only use case for such services, but if a service provider sees that 90% of traffic shaped a certain way is malicious traffic, it's understandable they will take steps to mitigate that traffic.
ETA: I'm not happy about it because I believe in the value of anonymity, but it is what it is. Here's a Cloudflare blog post talking about the challenges handling Tor traffic, which to their estimate is (a) 94% malicious "per se," so any tooling you do that tries to estimate intent based on origin IP address is gummed up by the malicious signal emanating from the same Tor exit node as your legit traffic and (b) anonymized by design, therefore any attempts you might make to build a reptutation signal for a given client are intended to be thwarted. The result is that a Tor user's traffic looks reputationless to a service like Cloudflare, and you can't just assume reputationless signal is benign (so, CAPTACHAs and "bot-like behavior suspected" walls).
> (Some cloudflare people) have proposed a solution to the Tor Project that moves part of the process of distinguishing between automated and human traffic to the Tor browser itself. The Tor browser could allow users to do a sort of proof-of-work problem and then send a cryptographically secure but anonymous token to services like CloudFlare in order to verify that the request is not coming from an automated system.
> By moving the proof-of-work test to the client side, the Tor browser could send confirmation to every site visited so that users wouldn’t be asked to prove they are human repeatedly
(+ Link to the suggestion)
The onion site Https cert idea is also interesting
I mean what's the harm if a bot has a read only account? Or an account than can send 1 email per hour - just enough you could tell your contacts that you have to migrate to another provider. Even if the machine is AI driven - the actions taken could be more nuanced in order to stop the ToS violation but provide limited account functionality.
One simple thing I'd really like to see is forbidding companies from terminating service without stating a reason, which seems like a really basic requirement. Once you have that, the next step could be legislating that there has to be a way to appeal service termination.
But right now, we're in the middle ages with this. "You're in jail, no we won't tell you why, no, there is nobody you can ask why and no process to revert it".
In this case Google provided a reason - a ToS violation. If you want to get in the details ( action X on date Y violates ToS section Z), that might be pretty useful to bots and spam accounts ( know which actions get caught and what to avoid), which are probably the vast majority of what is getting banned.
When the ToS are 15 pages long this is about as useful as hearing "You're being arrested for breaking the law" when you're in the back of a cop car. Doesn't really narrow it down and provides you no way of actually defending yourself.
I agree that being too specific can help bots but the current way of handling these things is obviously flawed.
You're off by at least 1 order of magnitude.
Can't check other countries since Google automatically adjusts the country version to your location but you can check yours here: https://policies.google.com/terms
//edit: but you're correct considering this doesn't contain any service-specific ToS.
I agree that currently, "you violated the ToS" is legally enough reason and enough information. I don't think it should be.
I also don't think we want the fight against bots and spam to justify taking inscrutable actions against real customers.
Just vote with your feet and move out of their services, life on the outside is just fine.
But when your account is suspended that doesn't really help you eh
For example, someone got banned from Ads for paying with Apple Credit Card https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20841586
I'm obviously not a fan of paying for protection, but peace of mind for your online identity is worth $X/month. Not to mention search, email, maps, etc. has way more than $0/mo. utility.
Lastly, you might also find that you will not be able to access the support options anymore if you have real problems or once your account has been locked for whatever reason. There are several services like this out there and I have seen it happen once at an old company: Provider locked a whole group of users out of the platform because of "suspicious login activity" on the admin account (admin was overseas). To access the support page you had to login first. Which you couldn't. Because it was locked. Took three weeks and snail mail (!) to get access to the platform back. Cancelled right after.
I would be extremely surprised if paying $6/month meant that your experience was different. Not that it shouldn't be, mind you, of course it should. I'm just saying it likely won't, so don't bet on it...
But if you actually care that much, why not just pay for Google Workspace? The cheapest tier is $6 a month and gets you access to more or less what you want. (n.b.: I'm not making any representations about the quality of the support that you'd receive, only that it's available. I don't work at Google.)
Also, their support is... not exactly useful. I had to use it once a couple years ago (a feature wasn't working, I forgot which one) and all they could offer where excuses and "we take XY very seriously" and "thanks for bringing this to our attention". They never fixed it, of course.
Google has excellent engineers who crank out amazing stuff with a passion. Google is however shockingly bad in converting these things into something of lasting value, supporting and improving the excellent seeds they have/had (just look at the famous Google graveyard). As money is no object for Google, you can only come to the conclusion that all this is done on purpose and even purposely sinister. They focus on their ad business as that has a ROI that blows literally any other product in existence out of the water. And they just don't bother with anything else anymore. I mean, why would you spend your days toiling, building and maintaining stuff earning a decent (but not an obscene) wage if you had an ATM, nay a dozen, that just shoot free money at you all day like crazy. I can understand it, but it's still sad, from a societal perspective ("make the world a better place" etc. etc.).
I haven't needed to contact support, but I think they have a manned tech support email address too.
Also, unfortunately Gmail/Gsuite is very cost-effective for us. We've looked at ProtonMail which seemed nice and potentially worth supporting but they would have cost us probably ten times or more what Gsuite costs (for email service only!) thanks to having to buy a ton of add-ons to get feature parity (they actually do charge extra for pretty much each custom domain and alias you want to use). And buying 100 GB of storage costs an eye-watering $120/month ($1.99 on Gsuite). I really don't know why their pricing is so weird. I know they can't probably scale as well on storage but adding aliases does not cause any measurable additional cost for them...
Anyway, if anyone decides to make a Gmail UI clone with a reasonable spam filter and pricing that's at most 2x what Google charges: Please let me know, I will migrate 120 new users to you within a couple weeks (not much on a grand scale but it's what I can offer...) :-)
The UI is much better than the gmail one, and the mobile apps are excellent. It supports tags or folders, depending on user preference (I prefer folders, so this is a huge advantage vs gmail.)
The spam filter is much better than gmail’s, at least for my account. Over the same corpus (my email went to both during a transition period), they both let zero spam through, but gmail was incorrectly blocking 10-30% of incoming email until I disabled its spam filter.
You can.
Plus you get an absolutely fantastic desktop app on Windows & Mac.
And for that you also get full Microsoft Office desktop apps included too.
Just get a domain like `Smith.com` and then use the email `John@Smith.com`. Then it doesn't matter if you're using Gmail, Fastmail, Protonmail, etc. You can switch to a different company whenever you want (to get the best rate, avoid abusive terms, bad service, etc) without having to update your business cards, websites, online accounts, etc.
You'll still need to have a way to back up your old messages though.
I used gmail with a custom domain for years before I finally decided to move to fastmail, which made the move pretty painless. That said, when I set it up gsuite with a custom domain was free. I don't think thats the case any more.
For storage, I’ve successfully reached human tech support at synology and backblaze.
It is a risk. I had a problem with my Google account, and while I was able to find a human to email about it, they were completely unable to help. It was literally "you have to do the thing, even though it makes no sense, because that's what our algorithm requires" (in my case it was repurchase an old domain in order to prove that I owned it, so they could cancel the account associated with that domain. Literally makes no sense, but it was the only way their process could work). That was my "ruh-oh" moment when I realised their products are basically unsupported and therefore shouldn't be used in production.
What happens if the domain-name is repurchased by someone else or claimed by Sedo, etc?
I figure that they either never thought through this process, or it was deliberately designed to make the cancelling process as awkward as possible. They're smart people, I think the latter.
So if they're going out of their way to be inconvenient to me, I'm going to go out of my way to never use their stuff.
(yes, loss from not handling a single .com domain is minuscule for Google - but I wonder how common is to run away from any Google service due to risk to entire account)
Stating a truism - to make a billion dollars, you either have to get $10 from 100M sales, $10k from 100k sales or $10M from 100 sales. Although each option leads to the same revenue, there are major implications as for the amount of support and attention you can spend on each customer.
Google/Facebook/Twitter obviously run the "$10 from 100M sales" model - meaning the only way they can provide profitable support or moderation is via inanimate algorithms, and deal with the PR fallout when they go wrong.
That isn't necessary though - other companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP also have tens of millions - to billions - of customers all with their own support requirements: the solution is simple: make the customer put up their own money as collateral for getting to speak to a human.
Microsoft charges $500 for a single business-class support ticket with ~8 hour return time[1] - and you get the money back if the ticket was not a PEBCAK issue. If you're a company that depends on Azure or Visual Studio or Windows Server then keeping $500 around just makes sense.
I just don't understand why Google and other companies that deal with long-tail customers don't provide this as an option.
[1] In practice, if you have an Enterprise support contract, the effective cost is much lower AND you get a much quicker response time - but there's more paperwork involved.
Say what you will about how crappy Win 9x was, but they definitely drove the average tech support load to much less than one call per machine.
That's why if you have an OEM license for Windows (where the per-unit cost is more like $40/unit rather than the retail $100-$300) your first-line support comes from your OEM, not Microsoft.
Maybe a company at a certain scale should have a legal requirement to get a person on the phone for any support issue, full stop.
All these companies will continue the race to the bottom unless you twist their arm. For PR, sounds like a nice job creator to me!
For any support issue? Given the realities of running a business over the Internet today, that would be a waste of resources and needlessly expensive.
But I do agree with you in principle though: I think there should be a legal requirement that anyone with a dependent business relationship to a service provider should be legally entitled to human review of any automatic suspension decisions within a single business day. This shouldn't affect long-tail businesses because when there's a strong dependency relationship there's definitely large amounts of money exchanging hands - from which presumably a small fraction would pay for the requisite support costs.
Moving an email is admitably much harder, but after five years I've managed to do all the major ones.
(Microsoft is just as bad - their sales people can’t be bothered to talk to anyone who isn’t a partner, but that worked out great for me, I wasn’t really feeling azure and it made a great excuse to not consider them. One of their sales people did leave me a VM three or four months later but we had already chosen another vendor by then).
If I have an issue with Google, I might try starting an adwords campaign and ask to speak to supervisors when their sales calls comes through, and see if there's an in along the way of "we would spend more, but you see you've done X that needs to be resolved first".
My other approach - not tried it on Google, but it worked very well on DHL and Uber so far - is to sign up for LinkedIn's premium subscription and use that to Inmail a bunch of VPs/SVPs and set out my grievance. My experience so far is that you need to find someone high enough up to be under the illusion - from lack of customer contact - that everything is well. They often seem to be shocked to hear that customers hit the wall, and get approached rarely enough that it's a novelty for them to help out (as such, it'll probably stop working if everyone starts doing this...)
With DHL in particular I got an SVP to get his assistant to light a fire under the customer service operation by telling them said SVP wanted to be kept up to date on how it went, and Cc'ing said SVP and me on the e-mails. A package they "could do nothing about" because it was supposedly on a boat back to the US, magically appeared in my office one business day later after it was located in a depot 5 minutes from my office (I wish I could say that was the first time DHL has told me a package was somewhere completely different to where it actually was)
The latter parts of the story were when I was part of Common Crawl, a public good dataset that has seen a great deal of use. During my tenure there I crawled over 2.5 petabytes and 35 billion webpages mostly by myself.
I'd always felt guilty of a specific case as our crawler hit a big name web company (top N web company) with up to 3000 requests per second* and they sent a lovely note that began with how much they loved the dataset but ended with "please stop thrashing our cache or we'll need to ban your crawler". It was difficult to properly fix due to limited engineering resources and as they represented many tens / hundreds of thousands of domains, with some of the domains essentially proxying requests back to them.
Knowing Google hammered you at 120k requests per second down to _only_ 20k per second has assuaged some portion of that guilt.
[1]: https://state.smerity.com/smerity/state/01EAN3YGGXN93GFRM8XW...
* Up to 3000 requests per second as it'd spike once every half hour or hour when parallelizing across a new set of URL seeds but would then decrease, with the crawl not active for all the month
File for a C&D and then, if that does not help, a court-issued injunction order ("Abmahnung" followed by "Antrag auf Erlass einer einstweiligen Verfügung"), if you're German. This works somewhat reasonable for Twitter, Facebook and Google.
https://turkishlawblog.com/read/article/221/algorithms-meet-...
I look forward to this getting used against Google and everyone else banning customers without explanation and/or recourse.
It seems that even Googlers themselves cannot get any human contact for account support.
(Sadly I can't find that Twitter thread anymore.)
EDIT: Found it - https://twitter.com/miguelytob/status/1315749803041619981
I am sitting here thinking of what would happen if my Gmail account got blocked. The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
> surely I am protected from this, right?
Nope. Google can disable you account at any time, without telling you why, and without giving you any appeal process whatsoever. No free-gmail user is in any way protected against this. People paying for Google Suite accounts are ever-so-slightly more likely to receive some support if anything happens, but that's it.
> The disruption it would cause to me is enormous.
This is why I'm slowly moving away from it (and everything Google, really). The service is extremely reliable, it raised the bar for email services and web UI, what they've done to spam is fantastic, but the possibility of losing such a key account and not have any recourse is now too terrifying to contemplate.
From recent tweets, it seems he's now leaving Google, and is busy retweeting stuff about people who have been fired and/or are suing Google. Wonder if him leaving has anything to do with that incident and whether it was ever resolved.
In my direct personal experience, I went on medical leave near the end of my stay there and when I came back over half of my team had quit and bailed for other companies or other orgs (largely over complaints with management).
I think this is just a case of very vocal minority.
Who reasonable is exited about Stadia anyways? I don't think it will last till next year without being slashed by google.
I wager 18 months.
As if you could create a big impact game from (or near) scratch in a year xD
Probably because they are the biggest group out there. Games are now bigger than movies, after all. The bigger the group, the more likely it is to contain a well-populated minority of viciously hateful people, a bit like "the bigger the country, the more likely it is that it will contain a sizeable group of hardcore nazis".
As a developer providing professional software, you're reasonably entitled to some respect from your customers, since your relationship is likely work related. But if you're making games, your product is eating up peoples' very valuable free time. If you mess that up for them, then you shouldn't be surprised to get a torrent of hate mail.
Article 4 sets out a range of protections for business users, including a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision"
This would seem to point towards a gradual start of the change in this way, although it will be interesting to see if anyone from Europe is ever able to use this against Google and others successfully. On the whole, the legislation seems to be sufficient, and it will come down to the usual issues of national regulators and their willingness to aid in enforcement action.
[1] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
Millions of pages of EULA, but not a single line in there to protect the user? No right to get your data once banned? No right to appeal or even be informed about the reasons?
Just imagine if Google ran the Justice system! They would suspend peoples drivers licenses without their knowledge and then throw them in jail because of a two strike rule when they get caught driving with a suspended license.
...
Would be interesting if this stadia fiasco would lead to Google rethinking their customer support (ie actually start treating their users as customers).
They fail in stupid ways (like this) and then cancel Stadia and then celebrate their "failure culture".
That or they’re convinced that they’re this close to fixing the automated system, which they obviously are not.
Knowing Google's engineering culture, you're probably spot-on. Ignoring long-tail events like this one is a common failure mode of this kind of relentless metrics-driven optimization (and they should know better).
I'm completely uninterested in making waves on social media, but I still expect services (whether paid or free) to work as advertised considering I'm not misbehaving. If they don't want me as customer/user, then say so and I'll find another provider.
What does high profile mean? I've heard of Leon Spinks, the boxer, but I've never heard of Andrew Spinks in my life until today. People with 5 digit Twitter follower counts are actually a dime a dozen.
Even people who were obscure can become "high profile" for a day. That's how going viral works.
> However, they were hit with a Terms of Service violation via email. They assumed it was issued accidentally, but three days later, their entire Google account was disabled without any warning or recourse.
https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/terraria-studio-re-logic-...
That seems like a dangerous assumption to make.
My imagination fails trying to picture a scenario where you could justify suspending that account.
Article 4 covers suspension and termination, with intermediary platforms (i.e. Google, Facebook et al) "the opportunity to clarify the facts and circumstances in the framework of the internal complaint-handling process referred to in Article 11".
It also introduces a requirement to provide "a reference to the specific facts or circumstances, including contents of third party notifications, that led to the decision of the provider of online intermediation services, as well as a reference to the applicable grounds for that decision".
It seems these automated processes fall foul of several hurdles in Article 4.
I have (had?) a Google Voice number that I started using for work stuff about a dozen years ago. One day 8-9 years ago, it just disappeared from my google account. Like gone.
I go to google voice settings, and it's telling me to sign up for google voice. Nothing I do can get this back - my voice number is now just anchorless, floating in the digital sea.
The crazy thing is, it still forwards to my cell number to this day. I can't change most settings for it, so I stopped handing that number out, but every once in a while I'll get an email notification of a new voicemail or text message to that number...
Unless you are physically speaking to someone in person, then there is always a middleman.
(Your ISP classifies as a middle man as well...)
It is illegal to compete with USPS to deliver letters.
so put mail in boxes?
I mean, there's DHL, Fedex, and others...
* excepting a point-to-point courier service for some reason
Paranoia is not new.
Domains can be stolen, deprecated or simply restricted from your use.
No, a town owns an address and rents it to you. If something goes wrong with the billing you get evicted, if they want a mall they forcibly "buy" it from you.
There's no resource you can count on in this way. Resources get reallocated at some point.
Not only can they, for many companies disabling accounts is the only tool in the shed. There's no digital governance platform, no user rights, no process, no punishment at all besides this final cruelest kill: only this bit flip, from enabled, to disabled, alive to not alive.
it's unbelievable tha not a single big platform seems to have any system of justice or remediation in place. it's all vast uncaring corporate monoliths as far as the eye can see, no contact I do, no follow up possible.
these entities are monsters. they treat us like trash.
Registrar TOSes are just as opaque as email providers, which just as many case of seemingly irrational domain seizures.
And by 'seizure', I think it is pretty clear that I mean 'revoking access to', in the same way as in the OP Google has revoked access to the given Google account.
Edit: Godaddy is not just a (crappy) registrar. GoDaddy is also a (crappy) hosting provided which I moved an organization out of.
Edit again: I guess I ought to explain domain names to you. Most DNS providers are crappy (unlike Cloudflare), and have a non-negligible TTL. Even if AR15 had access to GoDaddy's account to change their DNS records (A record for the www subdomain and root domain), it takes a while for new records to propagate globally.
More likely, what happened is GoDaddy told AR15 to take their domain to someone else. And thats what they did.
I didn't think for a moment this might be successful, especially when it stumbled out of the gate, because Google is so bad at sticking with projects that don't immediately do gangbusters.
Even still, it looks like the plug is being pulled faster than I anticipated.
https://kotaku.com/google-stadia-shuts-down-internal-studios...
I guess it's easier to throw out blocks and bans, placing the burden of proof on their customers rather than to have people looking into why completely innocent accounts were getting flagged in the first place. I've made my peace with it and I'm happy not spending a cent on your damn play store for the rest of my life.
For Google, users are necessary as they are product to be sold. Next are various small customers (developers) as they help bring in more users, or user interactions to be monetized. Android, nest, even google cloud (lost $5B last year) are either ways to bring in more user interactions and/or ways to try to diversify the revenue stream slightly to try to convince Wall Street that they don't have all their eggs in one basket (which they do)
But there's a risk: every new user is a potential source of inappropriate content (basically: anything that might disturb the customers, who would complain about their ads being associated with something or other). Their volume is high (so there are lots of opportunities for bad actors) but also their volume is high (so false positives aren't a big deal). So it's natural to have an immune system that just boots out perceived risks and also natural not to do an expensive thing like trying to follow up and see if it was a mistake. There's no malice involved, any more than there is in a tiger that eats someone.
The only real defense for any individual or smaller organization is to reduce your risk envelope. 1: don't put all your eggs in a google basket, and 2: when you must use google, make separate, carefully unconnected accounts for each project.
This sounds like work, and it is, but you have to do your own backups, brush your teeth, and call your friends sometimes. That's life.
How can one make this advice actionable? Creating new Google accounts requires providing a phone number to which one has long-term access (as they will sometimes require you to do SMS 2FA, even with 2FA off, when logging in). Using one on a different Google account links them (and could cause multiple accounts to get nuked), and you can't use a Google Voice number.
For some things I've taken to buying "aged" Google accounts on forums when I need true non-linkability, but in general this is an unsolved problem. I'd lose several accounts simultaneously if I hit the big G's antispam, as I've had to reuse some phone numbers several times.
What I do is use my gf's number (so occasionally I have to ask her for the code that shows up on her phone :-) ). I am fortunate not to use google for anything I care about, or even much at all, so this is no inconvenience for me; OTOH she not only keeps everything in google but used to work there.
I also have a standing open offer of personal proxy for creating accounts for people for personal, non-shady use:
Airlines and ISPs usually have support you can either call or mail. I don't know how to reach anyone at Google. By anyone I mean a real human, not a markov chain.
If they did this, how would you prevent people from saying that is unfair, or making it seem like it is pay to play, or something like that?
Disclaimer: Work at Google (far from this space); opinions are my own.
In fact, you can pay for your Google account with Google One, and I do, but it may or may not stop The Machine from accidentally banning my account.
From a B2B standpoint, it's just the name of the game. If a partner business is a strategic asset, you fast-track them. Imagine an advertising firm treating a multi-national corporation at the same (crappy) level as a small, family-owned company. Or, imagine Microsoft treating the US government and an ordinary Windows user alike. That's bonkers, and yet it's an apt description of how Google does business right now.
You can't please everyone; here is how I would frame it.
Stadia developers and business partners receive Enterprise Support.
It's absurd that they aren't already doing something like this.
On the other side though, Google cannot have 1 FTE per 1000 'clients' (paying-humans and/or product-humans). As a 'father' here wrote, you stay or you go. Or at least keep the personal stuff out ('15years of gmail' - WHY???) and leave the app-stuff within Google (or Apple for that matter).
This is why I think Google/Twitter/FB were not that vocal about the section 230 business. Honestly if they got brought through it would be expensive for them but they have the money and tech potential to automate any problems that arise from it which would just extends their moat from any potential competitors even more.
"In the case of Johnson v Esposito where the defendant is claimed to have sent an email to the plaintiff wherein this created a detrimental page rank effect due to defendant's low score..."
The correct approach is to make sure it doesn't happen incorrectly in the first place, and that it can be resolved quickly and easily if it ever does.
...and if you can't make it work at a given scale, don't do your business at this scale until you can. But that would be leaving money on the table now, wouldn't it? So, with no outside pressure, the companies at the top are the ones who don't care about making things work right.
There is no more than 100% wrong. Saying it is 1000% wrong implies that you are arguing emotionally, not rationally.
Rationally, it doesn't matter how google reacts to their non-customers. There is no obligation to treat them well. The correct approach for non-customers is to either become a customer or to switch to another provider.
If somebody is wrong it is the non-customers who could fix the situation. Their unwillingness to change email providers is what enables google to keep on providing that bad service.
It means I was employing the common rhetorical device of exaggeration.
Is the public reputation of the owner of this account high enough that the ban will make the news?
This service permits the export of (nearly?) all Google services data on both a scheduled and unscheduled on-demand basis.
I have my Google account configure to automatically export all service data every 2 months and upload ZIP files to MS OneDrive. This process completely bypasses me and my local computer. I just have to remember to check that the data transferred to OneDrive as expected.
The only constructive criticism I have of the Takeout Services scheduled process is that the scheduled exports are limited to a one year duration. I have to remember to reconfigure the next year's scheduled exports. Ideally I'd be permitted to set and forget, with a periodic reminder that the export is still happening and a "Good" / "Not Good" confirmation that the process ought continue.
Takeout Services won't restore function and applications, but at least a great part of my data won't be irretrievably lost.
Okay, so my account generates five 2GB zip files. I randomly picked file #4 and unzipped to inspect the contents. The structure of the zip file included the following:
* Google Photos
* Contacts
* Drive
* YouTube and YouTube Music
Interestingly, while the general structure looks okay, the content under the directories is incomplete. I'm not sure why this is. Like for example, "Contacts" has only one person's recently added Contact and only a JPG of an emoji face at that. That definitely isn't a complete data set, and makes me wonder if Takeout Services is not a cumulative back up, rather only a delta.
I downloaded a second file, to see how it was formatted. The second file also had Contacts data. It generally followed the contact groupings I have in place (ex. family, friends, medical, shopping, etc.). It had a smattering of .vcf files with profile pictures for some, but not all, people. YouTube directory had what looked to be a complete download of all videos I've ever uploaded, plus various other historical record of my YouTube activity.
Basically, it looks like recovery of a single service is only possible with a full set of recovery files (in my case, all 5 files). The content of each recovered service depends in great part on the nature of the service. There is a lot of garbage in the back up files for the unused / lightly used services. What's happening with the Contacts is a bit concerning since the the data is split between (apparently) all 5 back up files. Same thing for Drive, and maybe Mail.
Recovery of the data and service would be service by service, and dependent on the type of service, and the data provided in each service type.
The message reads:
My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay . I had just bought LOTR 4K and can't finish it. My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
My suspicion is that this is mostly happening because platforms that big like google or twitter rely very heavily on machine learning and other AI related technology to ban people. Because honestly, the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high.
So I get why they would try to automate bans.
But after years and years of regular high profile news of false positives, one would think they eventually would change something.
I mean the guy had direct business with Google going on....
Why would they continue like that. Isn't there one single PR person at Google?
Most likely yes. And the annoying thing is that they don't take into account different languages. The AI can recognize words, but not meaning.
A while ago some Dutch person tweeted: "Die Bernie Sanders toch." Die = that, in Dutch. But the AI obviously recognized the word (to) 'die' in English along with Bernie Sanders and just instantly drops the ban hammer. And it takes days,if not weeks to get an actual human to look at your case.
They've applied ML to discern status updates from emails. They've applied ML to recognize speech fairly accurately... This kind of behavior seems far too unsophisticated for that. In the Twitter thread some people are suggesting it's something to do with politics. If that's so, then it likely means hands-on-keyboard-finger-on-scales thing a human would cause.
If someone in that position is screwed, an average joe is most definitely screwed.
There are alternatives to all these: Search, Email, Game streaming, Online doc editing, Etc
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
Stallman has been shouting about it for equally as long and we either called him a crank or label GPL as viral whatever. We reap what we sow.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
YouTube feels like it's about to hit some wall though, content matching copyright take downs seem to be getting out of control.
Great, let's legislate that you can switch providers but you have to be able to keep your email address, like we did with phones.
...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).
The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)
It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.
Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.
We need to give them competition in the form of neutral and permissionless decentralized platforms. Such platforms should be the primary forum for commerce and communication, and privately owned permissioned platforms like Google should be small/bit players in comparison.
Right now the situation, in terms of whether the digital commons are primarily controlled by private companies or by public networks, is the opposite of what it should be.
One parameter would be: Amount of money this customer has spend on our products.
Another would be: Active time since signup.
I'm pretty sure if "money spend > 0" is actually a legitimate threshold to remove a lot of spam, although not all. "money spend > 200" might to the trick though.
Unfortunately the best way to do KYC is (still) human intervention (and use of data).
Of course this still isn't a perfect metric. But it seems that banning people with accounts that have spend thousands of dollars and been active for many years should probably be avoided and this will significantly help that.
I mean if the account has spent >$50 you can probably afford a human review at the very least.
As a general rule of thumb, if Google is struggling with a problem, it's not a tech problem.
[EDIT: I still hold a grudge against DHL for 20 years ago listing my credit cards as "in transit to South Korea" while I was in Santa Cruz, waiting for them. If Google hits someone with an actual large following or sufficient clout in a large company, then they might just find that one day they do so to someone prepared to hold a 20 year grudge even if they eventually fix the immediate issue -- I'm not mad at DHL for the initial mistake, but for the amount of trouble and lies I had to deal with before they took it seriously]
The big ones just cannot care about all, even if they really wanted. They had to be both onmiscient and omnipotent.
Email is how i do business or access to other websites and i store important documents in the cloud.
Like you i've seen the ban issue many times and even worse there's no customer support to help (just automated responses). Ever since i've been migrating away from google.
Sheer hubris?
I would actually lean towards organizational incompetence. There is just too much human brain mass at Google to say the the company as a whole is screwing up this bad because of hubris. They are just at such a high complexity level that the disorganization is causing incompetent outcomes.
So hire more people. You can't argue that you can't do your work properly because your AI is not yet up to the task.
Paid moderators can have their work supervised (a 'meta-moderation system') akin to Slashdot.
> "the amount of spam and abuse that are likely happening on these platforms has to be mind boggling high"
That is true, but the amount of money these platforms are making is mind bogglingly high, too. It's just that they decided that they will use low-cost automated methods in order to maximize margins. And as long as we all accept this, it's a good decision: more money!
But it is absolutely possible to do these things right, it just costs more.
Does bad PR actually cost Google money? I'm not sure it does.
A bunch of advertisers claimed they were going to boycott Facebook, but they didn't stick with it, and it didn't meaningfully impact FB revenue.
I think the only think that will really dent Google at this point is privacy legislation, so the only PR they're worried about it is upsetting legislators -- not upsetting game devs.
Because they can afford it, they are a monopoly
https://www.remarkbox.com/remarkbox-is-now-pay-what-you-can....
Taking the long view, the apparent culture of "just don't give a sh*" isn't going to work for the human race, not in the long run.
Imagine all the public squares to be owned by some company rather than the community. Now imagine an algorithm deciding to exclude you from that. To just ban you from participating in life.
It is taking too long for Google to understand what they need to do (to own public space, you must bring all the other public stuff too, like a legal system and proper rights protection and due dilligence).
We should kill the monster, while we still can. Break them up. They'll never learn. They'll keep destroying lifes. Less than 0.1% is acceptable statistical error, right? Just pray you are never the 0.1%.
The problems are less the automated bans but the missing human support after you got automated banned.
I you got banned go through a reasonable fast human review process then temporary reinstated a day later and fully reinstated a view days later it would be super annoying comparable with all google services being down for a day, but no where close to the degree of damage it causes now.
And lets be honest google could totally affort a human review process, even if they limit it to accounts which have a certain age and had been used from time to time (to make it much harder to abuse it).
But they are as much interested in this as they are in giving out reasons why you are banned, because if they would do you might be able to sue them for arbitrary discrimination against people who fall into some arbitrary category. Or similar.
What law makers should do is to require proper reasons to be given on service termination of any kind, without allowing an opt. out of this of any kind.
This is the part I find baffling. Why can’t they take 10 Google engineer’s worth of salaries, and hire a small army of overseas customer reps to handle cases like this? I realize that no customer support has been in Google’s DNA since the beginning, but this is such a weird hill to die on.
My best guesses:
1. The number of automated scams/attacks and associated support requests is unbounded vs. bounded human labor so it's a losing investment.
2. Machine learning is sufficient for attackers to undo the anti-abuse work on a low number of false positives from human intervention. Throw small behavioral variants of banned scam/attack accounts at support and optimize for highest reinstatement rate. This abuse traffic will be the bulk of what the humans have to deal with.
3. They'd probably be hiring a non-negligable percentage of the same people who are running scams. The risk of insider abuse is untenable.
This is the first time I hear someone making this claim. Is there prior evidence of this being a regular occurrence with outsourced customer support operations?
1. OP specifically said offshore hires presumably for cheaper wages. Anywhere wages are currently cheap there's a greater incentive to run Internet scams: it's farther from law enforcement agencies that care, alternate employment doesn't pay as well, there's even a culture of acceptability in some countries where trickling money from richer nations is seen as a net benefit to the local society.
2. Google is a high profile target. Scammers will try to get hired, existing workers will get bribed or realize the opportunity they have.
I don't have any scientific evidence. https://www.google.com/amp/s/news.abs-cbn.com/amp/business/0... is one instance of Google having to switch vendors for fraud in a non-1st-world country.
this. this is why. bots, chat or otherwise, are not competent enough to replace humans.
Actually, sometime humans aren't that great at this either, if poorly paid/motivated/trusted.
Either HN bias towards google is making sure these posts hit front page frequently (frequent enough for me to notice at least) or certain tiers of customers are treated differently.
https://cloud.google.com/contact
It may not be the right human, but it will be a human you get in touch with.
Basic billing support (including account suspensions etc) is available to all GCP users for free via ticket, chat or phone.
30 000 random bans per year without justification are entirely consistent with Google Cloud revenue in billions.
In similar way as people keep doing things despite (sometimes tiny!) potential for death, mutilation or bankruptcy.
A hotmail account may not be cool anymore but at least you're likely to be able to talk to someone if you have a problem.
Imagine if your landlord would kick you out and burn your assets. At the very least they should provide access to the export tool.
"Doing business with Google is a liability"
There’s no recourse if you’re suddenly locked out of your account short of making the news or attracting attention on social media.
Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.
I need to find Photos alternative because that's the last Google service that gets any real use.
I didn’t think I would ever say it, but I miss Eric Schmidt... Sundar has been an absolute disaster. Has Google even accomplished anything during his reign? And if they did, did they accomplish because of him OR despite him being there?
The only people who ever got their accounts recovered at all were celebrities or people who go HN / reddit frontpage.
You might be right, but Google changed as a company.
They started selling phones (ok, even if your account gets locked... you can still use your phone and/or create a new account to install free apps from what was the android market)
They started to sell storage (ok, even if your account gets locked, as long as you can retrieve your contents with Takeout, you just lost access to Google Drive, and not something of lasting value)
And they've been selling music (not anymore), movies, books, games (both on Play store and Stadia)... and more hardware that ties into their services (e.g. Nest Hub is useful precisely because you can have it automatically show your pictures from Google Photos, and you can have calls with other people on Duo)
The more new commercial products they offer, the more they should be careful about account bans. At the very least you want to segment access to them (as an extreme* example: even if you uploaded child pornography on Google Drive, after you'll have paid your debt to society, you ought still be able to play Cyberpunk 2077 that you purchased on Stadia)
(* extreme both because of the heinousness of the crime, and also how trivial/unimportant a videogame is on the grand scheme of things... but I think there's an easier case to be made for someone to retain access to the game that they purchased, vs retaining access to their Google contacts, which might not even be backed by any payment for the service)
Sometimes a great leader appears, but most of the time big companies are just slowly rotting away after the initial people created and grew it.
"Google Support" was already a joke way back.
- Make a website documenting cases like this and strongly encourage visitors to install an ad-blocker and tell friends and family and social media followers to do the same.
- Whenever there's a high-profile case like this, ask people to install an ad-blocker and share a link to this website.
That depends on the definition of "working". Will it change Google's practices? No, but it will ensure I don't have to endure them anymore, hence "it will work" for me just fine.
I am currently reading through Google’s SRE book and there’s a similar arrogance to it. It should be read as “here’s a bunch of practices that we can get away with because we are a monopoly & our end users are mostly non-paying/our real users are companies running ads”.
So many practices in that book would get me and my entire team fired it’s hilarious.
There US government has changed our treatment of monopolies over the last 60 years such that we allow those that lower costs, so most of our current tech behemoths are able to continue... they are “free”.
Such as?
Imagine..
Your home internet being cut for a day because it’s been up for 365 days and that’s better than the SLO.
Your iPhone sending 1 out of 1000 emails into the ether because you shouldn’t expect better than 99.9% service.
Bank losing some of your money because too many of their transfers went well this month.
Boeing crashing a plane because they didn’t do enough this year.
Very cool stuff.
Google is getting away with this behavior because of their monopolistic behavior. If they had competition, they would be spending billions on customer support, but because they have a monopoly, they can get away with having virtually none. This is their way of saving money and taking advantage of their monopoly. It's a shadow version of monopolistic behavior where the absence of services can be done because we have no choice. We need to politicize this issue.
Facebook is exactly the same way.
When a company reaches such dominance, and when people completely rely on a company like we all rely on Google, Facebook, et al., then we need regulations to prevent what is happening right now, which is using their monopoly to make life easier for them by not spending any money on customer support.
Would you prefer government change this balance by regulation, or let users decide what they want?
Many users choose very cheap typical service with a small but real risk of misery. Perhaps it's because they don't understand how miserable it can get. It's important that the bad experiences see public light so people's choices are informed.
They provide products like gmail for free because it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services.
But let's not lose sight of the fact this is one of the biggest companies in the world we are talking about. A company that could probably treat the entire GDP of a small country as a rounding error.
That margin you're referring to is very likely enormous and even if it cost them 10% of said margin to offer better service for it, they would still be making absurd amounts of money.
Being able to provide good support is a difficult skill to acquire and maintain, and most companies struggle with doing it regardless of how much they spend. You cannot get good support by throwing money at the problem any more than you can get good engineering -- it's a necessary but not sufficent condition. Moreover being able to provide good support requires a customer focus, attention to detail, and focus on quality that was never part of Google's DNA, and which Google prides itself as not caring about. To make Google into even a decent support company that creates as good of a support experience as Amazon (which is years ahead of Google) would require much more than higher margins, it would require a total rework of the corporate culture, leadership team, hiring policies, internal training and communications, etc. That's hard to do at a company that has such a dismissive attitude towards its user base, primarily because historically the real customers are advertisers and users are the product. It's hard to transition to more of an Amazon model where the end users were always the customers and the business was built around that understanding.
"These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads." https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6603?hl=en
Even if they don't scan the contents of your email bodies, you don't think they know who you are getting emails from, who you are emailing, and a boatload of info about who you do business with and such as a result?
I'm betting they do.
Do you honestly think they just blindly deliver emails and don't take even a single scrap of data from them for their own benefit? The biggest data aggregator on the planet is just ignoring all of that data?
Ok.
Yes, here is the official statement:
> Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. This decision brings Gmail ads in line with how we personalize ads for other Google products.
https://blog.google/products/gmail/g-suite-gains-traction-in...
Edit: The problem with google is that they collect a lot of data they can abuse, not that they are particularly known to abuse data. So the danger is that their policies change while still having your data, then there is nothing you can do.
I’d imagine Google could build up great profiles based on metadata alone - which domains email you, which you email, etc.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/17/google-gmail-tracks-purchase...
> When you open Gmail, you'll see ads that were selected to show you the most useful and relevant ads. The process of selecting and showing personalized ads in Gmail is fully automated.
They created that page in order to highlight that there are no humans reading your mail, but OP's point that "it allows them insight into people's communication which they can then leverage with search and ad networking to make way more than they could simply selling email services" is still true to this day. It's just that it's all automated.
> These ads are shown to you based on your online activity while you're signed into Google. We will not scan or read your Gmail messages to show you ads.
They don't scan your emails for ads, they use your search history etc for ads.
Does learning your social graph by looking at email metadata (sender/addressee, location, time) count as "scan[ning] or reading your Gmail messages"? There are a lot of insights you could "skim from the top" if you control an entire communication platform, even if you don't fully dig into the content.
And regardless: to OP's larger point, the reason Google offers services such as Gmail for free isn't mostly because their support cost is low -- it's mostly because these services allow them to collect a large amount of data that is then used for selling targeted ads, far surpassing the amount of money they would earn from offering ad-free services.
I love that you post a copy of the Google PR written help documentation to support this claim. Also, "I have never lied. Ever!".
That said, why do people care so much about Google using Gmail data for ad. You either trust Google or not.
If you are convinced that random humans won't read your private emails for fun and giggles then why should I care if their regexes or neural networks are fed my emails or my search history?
The only downside is if someone is watching your screen, certain ads can reveal the content of your emails in that scenario.
Google should simply provide a paid version for all its services in case people dislike ads but whether their code runs on my gmail or Google Drive content doesn't matter that much to me.
What does this have to do with anything I said?
I never made a judgement of it being bad or good. I just pointed out that probably Google isn't providing Gmail as a free service out of any kind of charity
Would I prefer government enforce building safety codes, or let consumers decide what they want?
Would I completely ignore the fact that Google has sucked the air out of the room with their market dominance, so hardly any competitors are left for consumers to decide between?
We can all easily name multiple email and subscription music providers.
Sure your business is destroyed, but you're right, you can easily get a new email address.
And when so many businesses are at the mercy of a few giant companies, we probably shouldn't deny them protection with the "it's a b2b matter" dismissal.
The third case is not actually a singular case. When we are talking about consumer facing services, there are many competitors in most cases. I suspect that it would even be difficult to make anti-trust arguments since the factors that funnel people towards Google is largely outside of Google's control.
Google's behaviour towards businesses is a different matter. While businesses may turn to the competition, their dominance means that avoiding Google will have negative consequences.
The WhatsApp founder seems pretty against Facebook and is encouraging and funding Signal. He took money from a company he doesn't believe in or like because who wouldn't. And this is despite him not liking Facebook. So realistically competition is great on paper, but in this case the competition already has such market dominance that any new company that tries will get squashed with a buy-out or other aggressive tactics. So realistically I don't see how competition will do anything.
I never sent it in, instead emailing and asking if there was any other way to get verified, but never got a reply, and a short while later they deleted my account and all of the pictures and data with it. I'm pretty bummed out because in losing all that, I lost most of my pictures from high school. I have almost no pictures of myself or my friends for roughly a 7 year span of time.
It's my fault 100% for not backing it up, but that's not the point. I was more frustrated with the fact that, for no apparent reason, my entire account was locked and they demanded pretty intense verification to even just get it back. I haven't used Facebook or any of its platforms since, but I have to say it felt pretty gross to be handled like that.
It's pretty sus that these companies use our data for everything but have no actual express responsibility to it.
You can do a lot of stuff at the bank, with your doctor, etc without ever having to show your state ID. What is facebook doing that’s so very serious they’d need it?
(not OP but I use a consistent nom de plume online)
Online however there is no such thing to simply see something. Everything is a copy that can be used for any purpose.
A few years ago there was a major leak at a porn streaming site with a large number of people getting their passports leaked. It was reported as a major disaster for those involved.
In the case of Blizzard I would say no and accept my losses. (Well, let's say Steam since I have actually dealt with them.) In the case of Facebook or Google, I would say no simply because I don't trust their motivations.
I can't agree with this, there is so much competition in this field already and and it doesn't seem to make a difference. There will always be ad-supported free services with minimal support and few security/privacy guarantees, that is the entire low end of the market.
* they do provide customer support, it could obviously be a lot better
Providing something for free is not a defense against anti-trust law.
The most famous example showing this, was regarding internet explorer, which was provided for free, yet anti-trust law effected it anyway.
Of all the services Google has, email is the least monopolistic, but simply because there is competition in email an open standard that many companies (including google) have tried to make less open does not change the Fact Google has market dominance in many other services
Just because unicycles exist as a means of locomotion doesn't mean that personal transportation isn't dominated by automobiles.
IMHO trust busting would be lot more effective and free-market friendly than having some bureaucrats trying to write regulations for what counts as "adequate" customer service or not.
Having supported tens of thousands employees on G Suite I think I can count on one hand the number of times I've had to call support. Admins know the support is poor, the agents aren't capable of providing more than basic break-fix support. Generally, calls are just to get official confirmation of an outage before notices hit the official dashboard. This isn't a service that requires a ton of support. Operate your business on a free account at your own risk.
"If we force these regulations on Facebook / Google / etc. or break them up, the stock market will go down (aka your 401k)."
Whether that's true or not for the common folk, it's a surprisingly effective tactic.
And it's definitely true for those at the top of the economic food chain, who are likely invested in these companies.
Given they tend to have more power politically, I just don't see us touching this.
Poland is introducing a law [0] to provide a right of appeal to the courts if a person is banned by social media platforms. The law's intention is to limit the platform's ability to remove content that they claim violates their policies, but which doesn't violate Poland's laws. Depending exactly on how that law is worded and implemented, it might provide protection for people banned for non-content reasons as well, including the inscrutable "we claim you broke our rules but we refuse to tell you which rule you broke". Of course, this doesn't do anyone outside of Poland any good, but other countries might copy Poland's law.
The downside is that Poland's law is inspired by the banning of Donald Trump and other right-wingers, and being associated with that political context is going to discourage people on the left from supporting it, even though I think people on the left could benefit from it as well.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/14/poland-plans-t...
Companies have been answering this growth with machine learning and that machine learning appears to scale poorly. Humans also scale pretty poorly. What would regulation look like?
We have been for a while now. In usual political fashion, there are two competing solutions (regulation vs trust busting) locked in a perpetual stalemate to the advantage of the abusers. Looks like you're in the regulation camp.
"Trust busting" is often offered as an alternative solution, by which I mean breaking up a company into smaller, more vulnerable pieces and letting a competitive market handle the rest.
Both methods have pros and cons and there are more than a few comments in this thread already arguing about which is better.
What we need is competition and choice to ensure companies are responsive to what people want.
I can't, for the life of me, understand why people think "regulation" will magic away all our problems. Here's what happens: a lengthy political process results in a bunch of laws getting passed. The large companies who have enough skin in the game to care send their lobbyists, who ensure the outcome of the process doesn't harm (and may even help) them.
Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate. All it ends up doing is helping the people who do participate, generally the larger firms, and the politicians who can say they "did something" to their constituents.
Plus, regulations are static. They don't get updated over time, in general, which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo, actively blocking change.
"Regulation" gave us banking. It's 2021 and I still can't move money same day, because all of, I think seven banks started across the country in the past 6-7 years. I'm not even making this up--check for yourself.
"Regulation" gave us the healthcare system, with insurance companies chiseling up the United States into a bunch of local (state by state) markets, limiting competition across state lines.
"Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
Rather than the word "regulation", I would encourage anyone who wants this, to REALLY understand what they're asking for. Go deep. Understand how the process works, look for good and bad examples, and really study the process of how these things get passed, enforced (or not, when political winds change), used (and misused -- ever tried to build anything in San Francisco?), revised over time, and their costs and benefits.
What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
More active antitrust may need to occur via regulation.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "regulation" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
I'm just very skeptical of the sort of thinking that treats some abstract, not-very-realistic thing called "competition" as a magic tool to solve all our problems.
See how that works? Competition can also mean races to the bottom, price dumping, plus it works best with commodities. In every non commodity market competition is diminished and sometimes disappears naturally.
For example, in another comment on this topic I wrote how I do a monthly backup of all my data in Google, Facebook and other online services that I don't want to lose. I wouldn't be able that without GDPR. (The export services (e.g. Google Takeout, "export my data" features on other sites) did not exist before GDPR... coincidence?)
You also call "regulation" abstract, but let's be honest; "competition" is also pretty abstract at this point, and to get a company to compete (with a reasonable market share) with Google across the Google suite of consumer products is arguably a much huger undertaking than good regulation.
> What we need is competition, not just some abstract thing called "regulation".
If there isn't competition, how do you plan to get it, short of policy to encourage it (aka regulation)?
Maybe, but I don't think so. It's entirely likely large corporations have fairly similar thresholds for action on such things, especially when reporters are calling for comment on a specific act.
If you go around poisoning the neighborhood cats, chances are your neighbors will all rapidly think you're a dick, even without a neighborhood meeting and vote to decide it.
It's also likely that there's a higher threshold for being the first to take action. Once the first one takes action, the rest can hit their (now lowered) threshold much faster or even immediately. That can give the appearance of coordination, but the only coordination being that everyone was waiting for someone else to be the first.
The unregulated free market makes minnows of us all for the whales to feed upon.
It's one of the main reasons there's so much hype about SpaceX.
What seems to happen is that an oligopoly makes the written and unwritten rules so complex that they injure themselves, creating a power vacuum for deregulation or just someone saying "fuck your (unwritten) rules" and either staying exactly within the confines of the letter of the laws, or leveraging their popularity into getting away with infractions. "Oops, didn't mean it!"
That we root for the underdog is in part an expression of our shared pain in the stunted progress that was made up until that point.
"Competition" isn't a cure-all any more than "regulation" is. Google got big because they competed well with the alternatives at the time.
Long story short, we need both, but we also need to figure out how to keep regulations moving forward instead of stagnating.
We've made cars quite safe in this regard; I suspect there's more wiggle room to drop deaths with crash avoidance at this point. Backup cameras (now mandated by regulation), pedestrian detection, automatic breaking, lane change warnings, etc.
Exactly.
Modern cars are optimized for "the tests" occasionally to the point of absurdity. As in certain systems get de-tuned (so to speak) so they are completely and totally used up at whatever the max test speed is because that's what makes the car look best in the benchmarks.
If we modernized the tests high speed crashes would be more survivable and low speed crashes would be less costly.
It's not all government's fault though. Society has a very unhealthy relationship with risk. If you make a quip about how crumple zones shouldn't be tuned to activate in parking lot collisions you are instantly inundated with idiots that don't understand that a stiff neck in a 10mph hit could be what makes a 60mph hit survivable at all.
Or they're pedestrians who don't want to be cut in half in a parking lot. Car-on-car isn't the only thing in consideration here.
If the US and the EU hadn't threatened Microsoft with anti-trust they clearly would have embedded browser and search into their (then) dominant OS.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals -- doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc -- who systematically exclude competitors and overcharge their customers because they aren't exposed to the full force of competition and innovation.
I find the overconfidence funny if not for the sheer ignorance of history. Snake oils were literally a thing. (And you're still free to buy them in a way)
We've seen this before, and thankfully anti-trust legislation allowed regulators to take effective measures against it when the market itself couldn't or wouldn't.
We could use a reminder that Google's competition, including Adobe, Apple, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm, eBay, and Google itself, all colluded with each other[1] to limit competition and market processes in order to keep tech employee compensation below its true market value.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
"Regulation" gave us the end of child labour.
"Regulation" gave us a 5 day work week.
"Regulation" gave us a reasonable number of holidays (in Europe atleast).
Regulation isn't fundamentally bad. Nor does is need to be controlled by lobbyists and big business. Your points against regulation aren't against "Regulation", they're against bad regulation. The response to bad regulation shouldn't be no regulation, it should be to work on better regulation and a better legislation process for that regulation.
Wasn't it Henry Ford who gave us 5 day work week? 5 days to work, 1 day for church and 1 day to get out and buy the cars he was making.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Labor_Standards_Act_of_19... is what extended something similar (a 40 hour work week) nationwide.
>Ordinary people like you don't have access to these meetings and by and large don't participate.
Ordinary people have less access to companies' internal strategy meetings and, like government, companies will choose to favor their most lucrative clients over the strategy that outsiders might find more 'fair.'
Edit: A way to think about this is that, in order to 'compete' with Apple or Google on the app store, you'd need to build an entire mobile OS. In the past we've dealt with this by classifying things of that scale as utilities and requiring Goog / Apple / AT&T to sell access to their infrastructure. It's just not realistic to expect a competitor to build up from 0.
>regulations are static [...] which means you get an entrenched group that favors the (regulated) status quo
This is often untrue, many regulations are outsourced to various agencies which are free to adjust policy as often as they see fit. By the same token, reluctance to cannibalize business or sunk costs can hold back private industry (i.e. 'green' energy needed massive public investment even though it was clearly potentially profitable).
> "Regulation" gave us banking[...]the healthcare system
The rest of the world has, arguably, more financial and health regulation and also has no problem moving money 'instantly' or administering care. I think this is unique to the calcification of the US at the moment.
> "Regulation" gave us professionals
This one is actually very interesting! Professionalization is generally a process of a group of private actors lobbying the government for a legal monopoly. I'd argue it's a mixed bag. It's good, for instance, that engineers can be held liable (and be blocked from working) if they design unsafe things. I think, now that we can track individualized results more easily, licensure may be an outdated way of accomplishing this goal, but I'm not sure it was always bad.
I totally agree on your point about professionalization. There might be a legitimate public benefit angle to it. But if you look hard enough, the distinction between a regulated profession (which ostensibly exists for public benefit) vs a union (which exists to advance its members interests) is fairly thin.
Since it is easier to track outcomes directly, it might be time to retire professions, or at least regulate them in a much finer-grained way, than just saying "Doctor" and letting someone do...anything...that falls under that huge "medical" bucket.
I think the key ingredient we'd need to do away with the organizations is have some strong form of identification that's safe to share publicly. Like, right now the bar association (or whoever) can check that you are who you claim to be and haven't assumed an identity. Having people get public / private key pairs from the government (or whatever) would do that as well, but we would need a system.
P.s. thank you for the compliment!
I don’t use Facebook at all, and I use some Google services, but not in any way where it would affect me much if they went away tomorrow. It’s a choice to use these services, and if you use them in a way where you give them the power to hurt you, you have chosen to do so.
Amazon will bend over backwards to ensure that the customer is taken care of and will even eat some costs or make concessions to make sure that the customer experience is top-notch.
By comparison, Google's customer service is absent. Google has plenty of money that they could spend to hire customer support teams and boost the customer experience so that incidents like these do not happen or at least get resolved quickly, but that does not appear to be a priority for them.
I think this narrative is false. Amazon will certainly refund money or eat costs but they have seemingly done little to stop scams, review bribes, or counterfeit products. Their UX is also increasingly user hostile (try cancelling Prime).
I would put them on par with WalMart, which also has a very liberal return policy.
https://www.youtube.com/t/contact_us
That seems to be what they want...
got a reply 4 weeks later without any solution. account was never unblocked.
since then i am not trusting Microsoft and not purchasing any of their products.
until today i don't know what the issue was. i only can assume that some nude pictures of my ex gf were uploaded to skydrive a few days/weeks before the account was banned.
I assume that many Googlies also have that opinion, and a few others are sure that this can be fixed, because they don't recognize that this is a systemic cultural problem. There's only been one Abcedarian unit that ever understood customer service, and they (Google Fi) dropped it on the floor and beat it to death within 3 years.
Or maybe Stadia team actually wants to help but they are ignored inside Google? Or they just know the project will be canceled so they don’t care?
Or maybe they really do not want terraria on their platform so they are willing ignore this?
YouTube's faulty algorithm erroneously locking your account should never result in you losing your access to your Drive, email, Android, media purchases, or anything else unrelated to YouTube (it shouldn't erroneously lock your YouTube account either, but limiting the blast radius is a no-brainer).
Way too many google horror stories to keep using my @gmail.com account. Although admittedly the actual odds are probably 99.99% that this frustrating issue doesn’t happen to any individual.
Any alternative which is as affordable as Google? How about Zoho?
I hate to say this, but MS really have their act together on "office in the web age".
There also seems to be some interesting correlation of megacorps being terrible at games, between Google doing their utmost to shoot Stadia in every foot it has, and Amazon execs having no idea how to produce games people actually want to play.
There are a lot of examples of individuals who have lost access to their accounts but no discussion of whether this is a significant proportion of google users. If I've got a 1 in 10 million chance of incorrectly losing access to my account that is very different to if there is a 1 in 1000 chance of losing access to my account. Without that context, you're basically just saying "losing access is a crap experience for the person involved" which is obvious from the outset.
Who cares?
No, stick with me here - what if we applied this logic to our justice system? "You're one in 300 million, who cares if you get a fair trial, let alone whether you're guilty?" And that doesn't even delve into lesser systems (like the ability to use public transport, drivers licenses, bad landlords, restaurants & food poisioning, etc).
It is, unfortunately, the same in many aspects of life, including many criminal justice systems. For example, if you are wrongly convicted in the UK it is incredibly hard to get that conviction overturned. It's literally life destroying for the people affected (definitely a lot worse than losing access to your gmail account!) but apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
That doesn't mean the company gets to throw their hands up in the air and say "fuck it, it's too hard". We wouldn't tolerate that with our justice systems, and we shouldn't tolerate with corporations.
> apparently the majority of the public don't know or don't care enough to pressure politicians in to changing it.
Remember, Google spends millions of dollars on lobbying every year as well. And that money comes from its customers, whether directly or indirectly.
The US is a democracy and its citizens do tolerate this level of failure.
It doesn't detract from your point but we are effectively applying this logic to our justice system. Most cases are plea bargained[0] and don't go to trial.
"The vast majority of felony convictions are now the result of plea bargains—some 94 percent at the state level, and some 97 percent at the federal level. Estimates for misdemeanor convictions run even higher." Excerpt from Innocence is Irrelevant [1]
[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
Sadly we are applying exactly this approach to our criminal justice system.
90+%[0][1] (94% of convictions at the state level, 97% at the federal level) of cases go through plea bargaining and never reach a courtroom. Trials are often impossible for poor defendants because public defenders can only bring a fraction of their cases to trial.
People like Shanta Sweatt[0] plead guilty because the alternative is to face a much longer potential sentence at trial.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/innocen...
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/prisons-are-packed-bec...
The guy lost access to his primary email for nearly a month... I think he's exhibiting a metric ton more constraint that is reasonable in this situation and google needs to get their damn shit together.
Gmail makes it fairly simple to do. I highly recommend it.
In a few years we'll have spammers with legit companies able to legally force Google to deliver emails to their "customers" inbox, to abuse compute resource, etc.
Just because Google decided not to act on its kafka-esque banning process.
If you're ready to add another layer of tin foil, don't store emails long term on an IMAP server if your emails leaking would be a problem for you (a la Sony or Clinton).
In the UK at least, the largest banks have to offer you at least a basic current account.
A lot of these big tech companies have monopoly positions over certain areas. They should have to provide at least a minimum level of service, and have proper processes when there are conflicts.
Big fines for violations? Maybe. But they have more lobbyists than that rest of us to resist legislation. Won't happen without a mass political movement (in the US at any rate).
How about a review department at Google?
We could pay US$200 for a human review of the situation, with a reasonable SLA (maybe two working days), with a promise of a refund if they determine the error was theirs.
Possibly a larger fee for a more aggressive SLA?
Possibly a subscription-style fee for publishers of mission-critical stuff? (Meaning, critical to the publisher's mission, not Google's mission.)
In the end, the only way I managed to get my original account unlocked again was by collecting a huge list of @amazon.com support addresses and writing a bot to spam hundreds of emails until someone competent picked up and realised my account had been mistakenly locked. I made dozens of calls but they hung up the phone most of the time (literally).
FAANG seriously needs to step up their support game. And not with "AI" chatbots or outsourced support teams with a few buttons in front of them.
"Oh, they must have had child porn in their drive."
"I bet they were spamming."
"Return fraud, totally sounds like return fraud."
They have to fight a lot of fraudsters and scammers, and do so successfully every day. It is easy to say that they cannot possibly monitor everything properly because they are so big, but they earn billions because they are so big.
This shouldn't come for free, every company has costs and proper customer care and monitoring is a cost for these kind of businesses.
The other argument is that you shouldn't use these services if you don't like them, but these companies are simply too big to avoid.
I've read quite a few of these stories over the years, and it is really bad if all your digital life is tied to the Google account.
A couple of months ago I took the courage and started migrating to a new email (using mailbox.org) with my own domain purchased via namecheap.
Took a few days to migrate most of my accounts to the new e-mail, but I highly recommend for anyone in a similar situation looking for some peace of mind.
This is why I have no Stadia.
Had a similar experience with Google Ads where their automated systems shut off our paid ads just before Black Friday due to a technical error, and despite having constant human sales contacts none of them could do anything useful.
It expired and I got repeated emails about signing into my G Suite account to address it. But I didn't register it and I don't have a G Suite account... and the only support is, step 1, sign into G Suite.
I finally tracked down the registrar they used and I contacted them directly and they helped me re-register the domain.
Worst case for your Google account is losing access to hundreds of Google services and anything you paid for, like apps or movies. And Gmail doesn't even allow you to use your own domain, other than by paying for G Suite which is clearly not targeted at individuals and doesn't work well if you try to use it as an individual.
If in the future Protonmail extends into other areas like Google does, and you start using these new services, it would absolutely have the same risks.
1. Don't use personal gmail accounts for your business.
2. Don't mix different business units on the same account. (Your 5-year old adsense page you forgot about probably isn't compliant anymore).
3. If your personal account gets banned, hire someone whose job it is to manage your business google accounts and don't touch them.
A good practice but won't help with this issue. Google has a history of banning business (admin/paying) accounts when it thinks that some user (under that business domain) has an unrelated personal account that was banned.
There have been stories here on HN describing how a small startup lost its Google Play account because one of their employees had their personal account banned for a terms of service violation. Then Google viewed that same person having an user account underneath the business account as ban evasion. In a puzzling move Google then proceeded to close the whole business account, so lots of collateral damage.
It's pretty crazy stuff.
Someone had a private, secondary email in the profile.
A private gmail account was suspended. They suspected that he has sent a "virus" in `*.apk` file as a gmail attachment.
This was a mainframe play for gaming. Think this platform will be around in 2023?
This doesn't help much if you have to publish things on the play store. But you can distribute android apps directly.
I've purchased personal domain with my country code and picked Fastmail as provided for now (since many folks here gave good feedback).
It's a company with MBA leaders who don't care about the product, which values engineers that have technical prowess and often don't care about the product.
Indie gamers won't come to Stadia anyway.
My guess for this is that given Terraria's large fanbase and high profile, Google probably handed them an advance for this and promised some promotion once the title launched on Stadia. Stadia also potentially provides access to users who can't play it on PC (it has a client for phones and some TVs, etc)
OT - where does your username come from? I'm sure it's not, but for a Brit to read it, it stirs thoughts of a terribly un-PC origin! :)
It wasn't until a few years ago that I stumbled upon an Urban Dictionary entry for it. That was so disappointing because I always thought I was so creative coming up with that unique and interesting-sounding name...like Tolkien!
I'm definitely not important enough for anyone to bother cancelling me over it (especially considering how mild and obscure it is), but I've stopped using it just in case. I still have a lot of old accounts lingering around that use it though.
He's the one getting stiffed by Google, but "gamers" always love playing the victim, especially when a game developer draws a line of any kind.
On a practical level at least backup your email with Thunderbird and your Google Drive with Syncdocs.
They'll zip up all your data for you to download.
I can imagine the EU will step in soon. There are multiple different aspects of being locked out of a "free" service provider like Google:
- Losing your email addresses - even if it was provided for free, will cause an immense harm. Email addresses will soon be transferable between companies like mobile numbers are today.
- Losing your own data - GDPR was a first step, user should have a right to his own data even if he was locked out of a platform.
- Losing digital goods like apps or ebooks. With a transferable email address these will become transferable too.
At the very least, I wish there was a regulation that forced platforms to provide users with an explicit reason why their account was suspended. No vague "please read our T&Cs" statements. Instead, something along the lines of "We have suspended your YouTube account because in video A you made statement B at time index C which violates our rule D". No doubt it would be burdensome for the likes of Google to implement, but that's what you get when you become so large that you can destroy your users' livelihoods on a whim.
Why don't journalists from e.g TechCrunch or the Verge confront Sundar point blank and ask him how can stuff like this happen and why is the only solution to blow up on social media?
This is dubbed as "Access Journalism" but it is not really Journalism at all.
Have had no problems reaching people about dev accounts, but also no problem even about consumer subscription services with unusual challenges, such as wanting to merge music or app libraries belonging to two different Apple IDs. (Can be done, an self-serve easy way and an Apple-performed hard way.)
In earlier HN thread, someone said “Devs would be more than happy to pay $300/yr to be able to talk to someone!”
My guess is an HN survey would suggest devs prefer to be outraged at Apple’s $100/yr — despite it being a price point at which you get to talk to people.
You get what you pay for.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/how-cnet-got-banned-by-google/
Journalists like access. Confronting Sundar and making him feel ambushed even for a second means they won't get the access for the rest of their career.
but used a gmail account instead of pro email account (that's not a good move on his part here).
and then he still can't get help from Stadia ?
Possible but very hard to believe.
Whenever I have needed something that required human support, such as resolving a false DMCA claim against my content or help with my G Suite account, I had no trouble getting email and phone support. I'm not a big company or influence of any kind either.
"Amazon says. Amazon's filing included copies of emails it sent to Parler in mid-November (PDF, content warning for racial slurs) containing screenshots full of racist invective about Democrats, including former First Lady Michelle Obama, with a series of responses from other users to "kill 'em all.""
" Those posts call for, among other things: killing a specific transgender person; actively wishing for a race war and the murder of Black and Jewish people; and killing several activists and politicians such as Stacey Abrams, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and former President Barack Obama."
Their CEO was recently fired for apparently wanting to have stricter content moderation [1]
Parler isn't entitled to be their customer after violating AWS's term of service.
AWS had a dialogue with them over multiple months.
It's not equivalent to someone losing their Google account for no reason and having no recourse.
People trying to make Parler some martyr is so silly. They could have hosted their platform co-located in a data centre in Alabama. Or hosted it in a friendlier to their content country like Russia.
[0]https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/filing-amazon-wa...
[1] https://uk.pcmag.com/social-media/131526/parler-ceo-fired-ov...
The Google thing is such an unforced error because despite this same story happening time and time again, google still doesn't have any ways for (important) customers/partners to reach them if things go wrong. In this case it's especially funny because Google Stadia needs Terraria way more than the other way around. (Terraria sold 30 million copies and is available basically every platform except Stadia, Google Stadia is a struggling new platform that keeps failing to incentivize developers to develop for the platform)
AWS cut off Parler after several months of moderation problems (https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/29095511/13/parler-llc-...). Any service provider will cut you off if you break the acceptable usage policy or don't pay your bill.
A $5k a month cloud bill definitely gets this.
You can assume that a high-profile game developer in a business partnership with Google is evil and got up to some sort of large scale malfeasance with their gmail account (why??? for what purpose? why would you risk a business deal to do this? what's the upside?) and then Google decided to ban them but not expose them for their misconduct. Or you can go "huh it sure seems like something bad happened to this person and he's not getting an explanation for it."