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Comment by ok_dad | Hacker News Reader

How often do people break a TOS? I’m not sure that’s a problem normal people should worry about. There’s always a TOS, whether it’s at the email service or the ISP or the data center.

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The problem is not breaking TOS in general. In general if that happens because of you, you simply apologize to the company, pay a fee or something and continue. The problem is breaking TOS of the internet monopolists. If that happens you don't know if you broke the TOS at all, if yes, then what part of it, how to remedy it and what the rules are in general. Instead you are nuked from existence with all dependent services immediately and forever, have zero recourse or understanding because reasons are always secret, so you can't even dispute a mistake of a dumb script on their side or abuse of third party (i.e. fraudulent DMCA strike). And after erasing your existence, Google or Facebook will sic their shitty scripts on you, to prevent you ever interacting with their services.

Not all TOS are equal, and not all services are equally important and have same severity.

The main threat for normal, well-behaved people is the growth of services that encourage us to put all our eggs in one basket, multiplying the routes by which you might attract the wrath of The TOS Overlords.

An example would be the number of people who don't want to issue perfectly valid chargebacks against Amazon because they'll lose access to digital purchases (kindle, audible, etc) in retaliation.

So more on-topic, it's conceivable that, for example, you have a dispute over a Google Play purchase, and in trying to exercise your consumer rights, you lose your access to your gmail account.

You don't need to be a troll to be violating a TOS, "if they're being punished they must have deserved it" is no more valid online than off.

Yes, this is exactly where I was going with the TOS comment. To take this risk to the extreme: Imagine in the coming future, when every service you rely on or use comes from the same company, and any TOS violation or dispute on one of those services gets you banned from the rest of them. That's the world of hosted services we are slowly moving towards.

I see, I guess I should have specified that I was talking more about email services like Fastmail, where you are just paying for email and if you break the TOS you probably were doing something absolutely bone-headed, and if not then you can just move your domain easily and take your email backups to another provider. Another example would be using some GUI or CLI utility and any generic S3 service to backup data, where you can move the backup to any S3 service you want to. I think that's a reasonable medium between losing everything because you put all your eggs in one basket with Google or with your HomeLab. Family can pretty easily pickup a Fastmail account and understand how to work it, and the same with a simple backup program on each computer plus S3 storage. I feel like this is the "golden path" through the middle of today's SaaS economy without having to train a replacement from your family like you're running an IT dept.

tl;dr: Everyone keeps saying Google/Facebook/etc but I am talking about hosting your services with individual corps, not "all eggs in one basket" style.

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. If you self-host your email, you are still beholden to your ISP’s TOS. Maybe it’s an improvement because it’s less likely you’ll be found infringing, but it’s still quite real.

Let’s not forget your domain registrar either…

It seems every couple of weeks we have a new "I was banned by $COMPANY_X and lost access to everything! They won't tell me why." HN article. It's probably rare, but happens often enough and the consequences are severe enough that it's a risk worth considering.

It's likely a lot more rare to get banned from your VPS or ISP than it is to get banned from something like Google, since who knows what the rules are there? Your kid could upload an inappropriate video to YouTube or something, and they'll associate IPs with your account and suddenly you lose access to Gmail.

Yeah, it just happened to me a while ago. Banned from an online game inexplicably, for something I am absolutely innocent of. Their support team refused to do anything, assured me "the ban is correct". Only got lifted because of knowing someone who knew someone and was able to have it actually looked into, rather than the usual non-investigation you'd typically get. I know numerous people who have lost their entire Microsoft or Google account (or other services), with zero explanation, zero recourse, just everything permanently nuked. This can happen to anyone at any time, as erroneous false positives happen seemingly arbitrarily.

You generally don’t self-host your email via your ISP, you use a VPS, and you can switch that at will.

I haven’t heard of any case where a domain registrar took away a domain other than as a consequence of criminal prosecution or court orders.

In any case, it’s far more robust than e.g. Google shutting down your account for unknown reasons.

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