Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com | Hacker News Reader

Google suspended our domain out of the blue – lyearn[.]com

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110 pointspriyesh260983 comments

I remember a few years back I worked for a startup that was all bright eyed for GCP. I warned them that GCP has a history of deplatforming and removing peoples clouds if they feel like it.

They swore that Google would be a kind and just ruler. Weeks later, they were booted from GCP. Never, ever, trust, Google.

What happened? Did they violate any ToS?

That really shouldn't matter though. In the real world, people make mistakes, people get hacked, rogue employees do things they aren't supposed to, Google makes mistakes (oops, wrong account), and so on.

A support policy that just cuts off all contact and holds your data hostage doesn't make sense. If they want to arbitrarily zap customers, then they need to support some downgraded interface that lets you extract your data, move your domain, see some explanation for why you're being booted, etc.

I don’t know the specifics. All I know is that one day it was gone and we had to go through hoops to get it back. We migrated to AWS within a month. Since I was more familiar with AWS, that’s the part I helped on.

Look, I don't want to sound like I'm victim blaming: you are a victim here and Google shouldn't have done this.

However, in the future, if losing your domain incurs "heavy losses by the minute", go with a provider where you can pay for real support, not $10/year on Google domains.

This is entirely fair. Neglecting infrastructure investment is a business choice.

Never use anything made by google if you don’t have to. They don’t care and they don’t have a support team. Your only chance to get anything is by making enough noise that their PR team gets involved or by going to court.

It doesn't seem to matter how many stories show up like this, there are people who will continue to do so for some reason.

Why would you use google for your domains?

Domains are important(most of the time), I use a registrar which specializes in it. If a company does less than 50% of their revenue in domains, don't use it..

Which one is it? I recently tried to fond an alternative register and was very confused by the offering. Google Domains s product looks and works pretty good

Namecheap has been reliable for me and offers the most responsive support I've had from a registrar.

Cloudflare is also a decent option if you just want a .com

my current favorite is gandi.net. i still have some at namecheap and an anonymous one at njal.la.

> incurring heavy losses by the minute.

if that was true, you'd have your legal department fix it instead of posting a complaint on Twitter and then cross-posting it on HN to get more traction.

Heavy loss is subjective. Doesn't mean it's enough to afford a legal department.

$100 is nothing to some but all to others.

I understand your confusion here, but not all heavy losses by the minute means monetary losses. Losing on client evaluations, SLAs etc that's what I meant here.

But genuine thank you for playing a role in getting us a traction.

When you pay the company for some service and the only way to reach their support is via Twitter, hoping for the best, I'd run away from that company fast as possible. Someone once said, "you are never big enough for Google to notice you", meaning, you can't pay them enough so you can have dedicated 24/7 support by real humans.

People should learn by now that Google's bread and butter is search and ads. Everything else is a second citizen to them.

I've been avoiding any google product lock in for years now. These ban cases might be rare but i would never trust them enough to build my livelihood on it.

Is it safe to have an Android phone? What if they decide to deplatform your Google account associated with it. What about trusting your number to Google Fi? I have both and I am nervous.

Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account.

Google Fi: Depends on your country's laws for how phone number transfers work.

> Android phone: Probably - the worst that could happen is you get locked out of the play store and have to make a new account.

If you have apps, movies etc bought from Google Play — those are gone too.

If you use a @gmail email address, you lose that too and you now have to tell people not use that any more.

Except for buying apps, none of these have anything to do with using Android.

I have a US Fi account and a US number. Can they just deplatform my account and take the number? I will loose banking and exchanges access

In the US, carriers are legally required to port your number to your new service, but they can delay the process by up to a week. Generally, it's much much faster (I've ported numbers in literal minutes), but I don't know how it would go with a banned account.

This case was in the news last week. Some dude named Dave took a medical photo of his young son that got flagged as CSAM. His android account was locked with no way of recourse.

At this point doing anything but search and ads with google is like going to a steak house and ordering a lasagne. It’s just not what they’re good at.

That’s not the whole story. They didn’t reinstate his account because of another, medically unnecessary, photo of the kid in bed with his nude wife.

Why is that a bannable offense?

source and context? I think that happened in the U.K., and I'm not sure what their laws are, but in the U.S.A., as long as there is nothing sexual about it, such a picture is not illegal.

Source? I can’t find anything about this as an addendum to the story. Guardian, verge and NYT just end the story at “account still blocked”.

It was a video and he didn't send it. He just happened to have it on the same phone.

"the subsequent review of his account turned up a video from six months earlier that Google also considered problematic, of a young child lying in bed with an unclothed woman."

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/tech...

Interesting that Google can just browse through the photos on one's phone, completely at their own initiative.

"Private and secure" - private and secure from other people. Never from Google. Never from the US government.

Your android phone will continue to work as-if-offline if your account is banned. You can still do calls/sms and browse the web, but all google apps won't work until you create a new gmail account (and obviously you'll lose all your data).

Question: Assuming you have a modern android phone like samsung galaxy S20. When you factory reset your phone you need to log in with your google account to use it. This prevents people from stealing your phone.

How does this work when your account has been banned? Is my phone a brick afterwards? Someone should try this out.

Your phone is only a brick if your account is banned at the same time as you reset your phone. Either alone won't brick your phone.

Some might see Occham's razor in this, but I could imagine this being a real edge case:

When I had an Android (OnePlus) device I often factory reset when tinkering with it, go to bed and continue whatever I wanted to do on the next day. Of course my phone had it's bootloader unlocked and TWRP recovery, since I was trying to get lineageOS + spoofed signatures + microG to work.

So basically the scenario is: factory reset your phone, go to bed, wake up with banned google account, have a new brick decor for your garden.

Would be funny if they didn't think of this possibility.

So, you're supposed to avoid doing factory reset on a phone once your account is banned? Sounds like an essential feature being held hostage.

No - you can always remove the google account from the phone, or add a different one, before resetting it.

From memory you use your Samsung account for that feature.

You are not forced to use Google services with Android, so that's not really the same

> you can't pay them enough so you can have dedicated 24/7 support by real humans.

You absolutely can pay them enough to have this. Nearly anyone giving Google $100k+ per year will have a rep assigned.

The problem is the rep is nearly powerless - lots of account problems the rep can't help solve - all they can do is issue refunds/goodwill-compensation in cases like this. They can internally message the team responsible, but in a bunch of cases they can't reverse auto-bans.

I think there is something to be said for having redundant domains for backend apis for an app, with redundant dns. If one was to go down have the app fall back to the other. Not much help for a web app of e-commerce business though, domains are are one single point of failure that you can’t easily fix.

But it’s one of those things that isn’t mission critical while building a business and so can easily be overlooked. I see redundancy in the backend, or at least a disaster recovery plan that covers single points of failure, the same as normal backup procedures that most of us already do.

I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of this. Imagine how many startups and great, growing ideas have been squashed because Google, Microsoft, Apple, Cloudflare etc. cut them away them in the early stages, and the news of it simply never reaches HN or whatever little corner of the internet we sit in.

Simply unfortunate that one cannot rely on Google for critical stuff. The least one can do is compartmentalization across various Google account and keeping domain names, considering they are at the very root of the infrastructure chain, separate from other activities.

I just [literally in the past hour] had to [unsuccessfully] deal with a Google Fi mess-up while traveling (I made the mistake of running their crappy app on the iPad, which forced me to go through some “activation” steps on first run even though SIM was already active, which in turn disabled my primary SIM and moved the primary line to iPad data SIM). I had to reactivate it on my phone using their app, by deleting and reinstalling, which eventually worked, but left the data SIM on iPad inactive. Support is of no help except to suggest shipping a new data SIM to my primary address, obviously of no help while traveling.

You cannot effectively "compartmentalize" when it comes to Google. It actively tries to resolve you into one person, most of the time it succeeds. Or worse, you are marked with a false positive.

Yeah, Google is just a bad choice for domain registration, since they have that policy of just ghosting you for support. If you're going to use Google, stick to services where you can route around them if they decide they aren't going to talk to you.

Please give me too 3 alternatives

Here’s a list of 4000 alternatives: https://www.iana.org/assignments/registrar-ids/registrar-ids...

My personal choices would be Namecheap, Porkbun, Gandi, AWS Route 53 and Cloudflare.

I don't have any at hand, but look for the registrars in your own country, and if none are good enough for you, look for registrars in the European Union.

Do not use US American registrars at any cost, you will regret it eventually.

I wish you the best of luck. I hope that everyone here will view this as an important lesson about relying on Google.

Ehm I am very sorry and not the greatest fan of Google by a long shot, but... who are you? Why should we trust you?

Again I am really sorry but I'm just missing street cred; I only see two new HN accounts and a Twitter account with 79 followers.

Edit: in response to all the comments and downvotes: really, I would not be that hard to convince. How about a LinkedIn page? Glassdoor? An archived version of the site? A personal webpage? A cached Bing search result? Anything, really.

> who are you?

I suppose we'll never figure that out, because his domain is gone. Little bit cynical and circular isn't it, cull the 100 follower people, who will care, they only got 100 followers!

And if this was a coordinated deplatforming, who knows how many properties of theirs went down simultaneously, including cache from various search engines. E.g. If they used their Gmail account for emails to all those services mentioned up in the thread. Your email is your identity and it's not owned by you atm.

Why shouldn't we? It's not like Google didn't do such things before.

At least ~half the 'BigCo is being unreasonable' stories here have another side where the poster was doing something terrible (eg. sharing child porn on their google drive account), and then complaining when their account gets blocked for 'no reason'.

The BigCo can't typically make any comment when this happens - merely say 'we have investigated and decided to uphold the ban', and then they look unreasonable.

Sometimes the unreasonable thing is done by malware on the users computer/phone, so even the user isn't aware, but from BigCo's perspective it all looks the same.

BigCo processes are still opaque, but often the outcomes aren't as unreasonable as they seem.

>At least ~half the 'BigCo is being unreasonable' stories here have another side where the poster was doing something terrible (eg. sharing child porn on their google drive account), ...

Where did "at least half" come from? Is this a statistic derived from factual information or just some gut feeling?

Knew someone who used to be involved in investigating these cases.

BigCo most of the times says we banned you but we don't tell you why.

You neglect to mention that this "child porn" example was private communication between child/parents and their doctor showing a medical issue, which (an algorithm of) Google had decided to upload, scan, and sent to the police.

It was never the intention of "the poster" to "share child porn". They never had any to begin with. It's just algorithms doing things, then blaming the owner of the device for what Google (incorrectly) perceived them to be doing.

Why should we trust google? They have a proven track record of doing this.

Yea GP has it backwards, I will literally take the word of a random on the net over google.

A random person may do something shady.

google does do shady shit constantly.

You should trust Google, and Facebook, and PayPal and Amazon, and Apple and Microsoft, and Cloudfare, and ... Don't worry. Everything will be fine. /s

>An archived version of the site?

Instead of making that snarky edit, did you try going to Archive.org and looking up the website via the Wayback Machine? Because I did, and there are plenty of captures of the site. Took me probably about the same time or less than it took you to edit yours.

https://web.archive.org/web/20180701000000*/lyearn.com

I did not mean the edit to be snarky. And I also did find the archive link, but none of those pages seem to load for me. Maybe the error is on my side - can you get a snapshot from the past year or so to load?

Here is a LinkedIn profile I found with quick search, seems legit. Why didn't you do the search yourself before posting this?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuchitgandhi

I did, but LinkedIn asked me to login and I do not have an account.

You specifically asked "How about a LinkedIn page?" and... now you're saying you can't see the page because you don't have an account?

I can access the site, presumably their DNS records are cached by my ISP: https://i.imgur.com/75enaj3.png

Dude, what's your issue

I only have something like 3 followers but I don't post fake stuff

Meanwhile people with millions of followers post misinformation all day long

Has it ever occurred to you that the number of Twitter followers means absolutely NOTHING?

There is a general business lesson here: don’t entrust your critical infrastructure to any provider that does not offer a direct line of communication.

People here stating you shouldn't use Google for domain registration you're partly right, however, what about TLDs owned by them?

I have several .app domains, so there's not really a choice there. One of those is taking off (getting lots of users/visitors) and every year they raise the price to renew it, there's nothing I can do about that as apparently they own the TLD and have the last word on it. I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in their TsS there's a clause that allows them to take the domain away from me for whatever reason.

Registry intervention isn't that common, unless it affects the domain name itself.

I think the two most common encounters would be UDPR cases and government take down demands. I don't think any TLD owner will bend over backwards to protect the registrant in cases like this. They will just comply and move on.

For Google, though, the worst I imagine is their TLD nameservers using their logs to rank your domains for search results.

Edit: Google has now resolved the issue, and we're up again. Expedited help from Google. Thanks a lot!

Reason mentioned being one of our customer's account was involved in phishing. We're checking this internally.

To Community: Appreciate all your efforts in giving us the traction/momentum. It shows us that there are lots of helpful & caring people in the community, I would love to be of any help to other members in the community, to assist in anyway possible.

Thanks & Regards

The domain is still registered until 2023-02-23 but the WHOIS records got updated today [0]

Expires On: 2023-02-23

Registered On: 2015-02-23

Updated On: 2022-09-11

[0] https://who.is/whois/lyearn.com

I would love to see what you were hosting on this website that made google suspend your domain like that.

Probably not the same thing as in 2004. I would guess it is a plain trademark thing. We recently had to cease using a domain.

https://web.archive.org/web/20041127043041/http://www.ylearn...

Multimedia Knowledge is a new and exciting educational publishing company established to provide the most up-to-date, effective, educationally sound material for 21st Century K-12 students, teachers, and the educational community.

The BioScope Initiative CD-ROMs have been developed at Purdue University by an outstanding group of teachers and educators and was funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the foremost authorities in science and education in America.

ylearn.com != lyearn.com

This is my weekly reminder to not use Google for anything essential.

tldr; Google screwed us big time.

None of our apps are working. Google Domains abused locked and suspended our domain lyearn[.]com. There were no warnings. Support team is doing nothing and of no help. They're not allowing any access to our domain. We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere.

No incoming emails can come(since DNS lookup fails), so customers also cannot contact us.

> We can neither transfer registration nor delete and register from elsewhere.

Damn, that is shit. I can understand removing the domain and letting you transfer, but holding your domain hostage is just another level of evil.

Not that it matters necessarily but do you have any idea what could have triggered the suspension? What did you host on this site?

counter-anecdote: rookie dev left keys in the open, cloud account got hacked, google detected suspicious activity, suspended the account immediately after, we appealed, they responded within the day and vaiwed the extra cost. It was a good day for us.

Why do small startups even use cloud computing? Seems wasteful.

this happened to me too :(

How much time did they take to remove the suspension?

(Semi-tongue-in-cheek:) If you can pin this on Google being racist against your ethnic group or whatever, you might be able to stir up enough of a scandal on social media to get Google's PR to notice.

Not sure this is such a great course of action, but still probably with a better chance of success than waiting for Google to support you through regular channels.

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