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Comment by thefurdrake | Hacker News Reader

A more-measured approach would be to just disable your ability to purchase/engage with purchased services/products.

Of course, Google is actively motivated to make forcing them to face consequences for mishandling product disputes punishable by complete ostracization from their "ecosystem".

On the one hand, this feels like a Surprised Pikachu moment: Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.

On the other hand, I've been decoupling my life from Google's services for a reason, and I'm not the only one. Google has ceased providing products for my needs superior enough to the competition to merit putting up with the ever-looming threat of their hegemonic bullshit.

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> Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.

I would completely disagree. It depends on whether the chargeback was justified. If a company illegally charges a user and the user merely declines to pay it, the subsequent blackballing (and damages associated with it) are damages of and resulting from the original crime / tort. It begins to smell like extortion.

> I would completely disagree

Would you really, though? What does "complete" disagreement take the form of here, the denial of banning for chargebacks entirely? For every random hypothetical one can provide of a company engaging in poor faith, I can invent a hypothetical of someone charging back against a company despite receiving their product in good faith. I did not say "Is always a valid reason", and it perplexes me when I receive responses that seem to deliberately interpret statements as absolutes when they aren't phrased as such. :(

> Of course a chargeback, the final legal method through which you have issues redressed, is a valid reason to deny you further access to a private company's platform.

Normally I would agree, but a representative from google told OP to do a chargeback!

Google is historically incapable of ensuring the left hand knows what the right is doing. That isn't to say it's an okay way for things to be. It isn't.

However, if I were to get into a disagreement with Google, and a CSR told me to "do a chargeback", I would assume that CSR was engaging with me in poor faith, because these megashitcorps have a penchant for completely banning people out of hand for chargebacks to the point where it's basically autonomic. It seems like something I'd tell an annoying customer to do if they were annoying me and I was having a particularly bad day, because doing tech support is a miserable and soul-destroying job.

Again, this isn't a justification/rationalization, because this isn't an okay state of affairs in my mind, but I generally expect that a chargeback means I am ending my relationship with a business. Perhaps the OP from reddit should adopt the same mentality defensively.

That's the crux of the issue. If a CSR told you to jump off a bridge though... Yes you might win something if charges are pressed, but also you really should've known better.

In matters of "ToS;DR" it's generally the case that terms aligned with common expectations are enforceable but terms that don't aren't. That leaves me wondering if "chargebacks get you canceled" is a common expectation or not. The answer to this strongly influences whether my bridge analogy is accurate.

I wonder if the Google+ social network failed because people were paranoid that they could lose their whole digital life for making ban-worthy posts on Google+.

Nah, it was just lame.

Forced corporate ‘fun’ never works.

Agreed. This is rather shitty thing for them to do, since most people don't use Google for ecommerce, but for just about everything else.

The final legal method is always court. You can always file a small claims or regular civil case.

I see dozens of people do this weekly against big companies (my company, link in bio) and it does tend to work well because the legal department is generally more motivated to resolve things than customer support. Airlines and car companies are the most common disputes from our data.

That said, you can't force Google or anyone to do business with you. This kind of thing should be regulated for big gate keepers.

Yeah, the appropriate phrasing would have been "the final legal method you can take on your own". Obviously in America you can sue for anything on a whim.

Though, thinking about it, I am not sure that's accurate either, because it's a bit difficult do a chargeback by yourself if the card issuer doesn't want to cooperate. Whoops.

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