Hacker News Reader

Comment by nox100 | Hacker News Reader

I challenge you to go to any restaurant that has "unlimited refills", back up a tanker trunk and fill your truck. I don't think any court would enforce "unlimited" for that situation. I'm not sure this storage one is all that different

View on HN

But restaurants explicitly ban doing that. Even all you can eat restaurants don't let you take out food. Google never hinted at having a maximum limit. Theres no reason to believe or expect that unlimited actually means some arbitrary limit that google just came up with after you signed up. Your analogy would've been better if the journo tried hosting a file share service using his drive account as a back end or something but that's not what happened

Not a great comparison. It was an _enterprise_ plan with unlimited storage. What kind of enterprise did Google aim their "unlimited" message at if it excludes a small company (an individual journalist) with lots of video footage?

I think the answer is that Google did in fact target companies with exceptionally high storage needs. They were just assuming that everyone who had lots of data would also spend a lot on other services and that didn't pan out.

A better comparison is probably a restaurant promising unlimited coffee refills for life, forgetting to make it conditional on ordering food as well. Then some office worker who never eats breakfast turns up every morning for three double espresso refills.

I feel like this isn't the best example, such restaurant can say that its only unlimited if you drink it in-house, in plain view. You almost never can take out food or drinks in all-you-can eat restaurants.

Generating/collecting 200TB of data is however entirely normal in some professions. Something Google should be and almost certainly is aware of.

In your analogy it would be Amazon setting up an S3 front on their corporate unlimited Google account. That didn't happen, it was just someone with more data than average. Google knows very well what the distribution looks like.

A lot of restaurants place a limit on the size of the container you're allowed to use, and there's a cultural expectation that you won't loiter just to fill more soda. Assuming you bought food and are continuing to buy food, the unlimited soda is more of a hook to keep you there and has clearly outlined terms. Your bladder will also give way before your stomach does.

In fact all you can eat buffets ban people from showing up after they completely break the system.

All-you-can-eat is not the same as unlimited.

So should cloud providers offer all-you-can-store in the future because by your logic that's not the same as unlimited?

An all-you-can eat might ban you for getting more food but they won't pump your stomach to undo all the food they already gave you. Google already let him store that data, if they regret that they should ban him from storing more. Deleting his data after permitting him to store it is completely over the line. No buffet in the world runs like that, not even those owned by literal gangsters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com