The reason? None. Just a generic response sent to the developers on Christmas Day. Might have been the grinch himself issuing those automated responses to others.
This company and its services (including, YouTube) are run by bots and they are the ones doing the moderation and not even the humans running them care at all.
Unless something completely fundamental happens, Google (and its services) don't care and they will never change.
I think they need to balance how strict their abuse detection is. Making it too strict will kick out legitimate users without mercy. Making it less strict will allow potentially harmful (for business) content to spread on their platform, which could lead to lawsuits, loss of advertisers etc. You can see which direction is more appealing for a corporation.
So concretely, now we complain about mistreated users, but if the automatic moderation was less strict, we'd complain about extreme content. It's not an easy problem.
Google is not incapable of providing customer support. Netflix, Apple, and Amazon all manage to provide free, robust customer service.
Google is simply unwilling.
Linearly scaling up on human support agents doesn't look aligned with an AI driven strategy to enable income that is only coming from their advertising services.
From https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/020515/busin...
Google Services generated $69.4 billion, or about 92% of total revenue, in Q4 FY 2021. Advertising revenue, at $61.2 billion, comprised 88% of the segment's revenue. The segment's revenue is up 31.3% compared to Q4 FY 2020. Google Services posted operating income of $26.0 billion, up 36.3% from the year-ago quarter.
This figure surpassed Alphabet's total consolidated operating income of $21.9 billion due to operating losses in the other two segments as well as unallocated corporate costs. Google Services is thus the only segment that currently makes positive contributions to Alphabet's overall operating income
These horror stories would mostly come from publishers that rely on the source of income, from whom the yearly Google play is likely to be at least a few thousands. There's no excuse to not involve a human in a decision as drastic as account termination.
The figures include sales of apps, in-app purchase and *app store ads*.
The attention economy is addictive for those pushing it as well.
Let people pay for a manual review (say $300) with Google refunding the amount if it's found to be erroneous.
1. The support cost is totally offset -- at $50/hour, it would give someone four hours to investigate and two hours to prepare a report.
2. Bad actors won't pay, and neither will people who haven't really made money on the store
3. Google develops an actual framework for resolution
4. Some level of trust is developed again
5. It helps provide better training data for Google's automated process -- the engineers behind it probably cost $300/day each.
I really can't see a situation where this would incentivise Google to steal money. It would land them in much hotter water than anything else they've been involved in before. We're talking international lawsuits if just one single support staff decides to be a whistleblower. It's too involved of a conspiracy.
"Let's be as evil as we want to be" is a fairly inappropriate guideline for a company like that.
No, it isn't. Google wouldn't go out of business. I doubt that they'd even take a hit of a few percent in profit.
In general though, if you really can't afford proper customer service, then you should simply not be providing services at that scale.
For free accounts, maybe. But it wouldn't be very expensive to provide basic service to accounts with significant money flow where google is taking a cut. Or accounts that are directly paying every month.