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Comment by MrDarcy | Hacker News Reader

File a small claim for damages up to 10,000 to 20,000 USD depending on your local statues.

It’s actually pretty quick and easy. They cannot defend themselves with lawyers, so a director usually has to show up.

It would be glorious if everybody unjustly screwed by Google did that. Barring antitrust enforcement, this may be the only way to force them to behave.

it wouldn't work. they'd hire some minimum wage person to go to all of them and just read the terms and conditions you agreed to that include language about arbitration or whatever

How did they agree to those terms?

Probably includes something insane like "By allowing your website to be crawled by google spiders, you agree to the following terms...."

Ok, by not objecting withing 5 seconds you hereby agree to let me shoot you in the head.

Especially not when the plaintiff isn't even a user of the service.

In all US states corporations may be represented by lawyers in small claims cases. The actual difference is that in higher courts corporations usually must be represented by lawyers whereas many states allow normal employees to represent corporations when defending small claims cases, but none require it.

Not to mention that they have general council, who are lawyers but also just employees.

This is not accurate. I filed a claim against Bungalow in Oregon. They petitioned the judge to allow their in house attorney I was dealing with to represent them. The judge denied the request citing the Oregon statute that attorneys may not participate in small claims proceedings. Bungalow flew out their director of some division who was ill prepared.

Slam dunk. took all of 6-8 hours of my time end to end. The claim was a single page document. Got the max award allowable. Would have got more had it been California.

55.090 Appearance by parties and attorneys; witnesses. (1) Except as may otherwise be provided by ORS 55.040, no attorney at law nor any person other than the plaintiff and defendant shall become involved in or in any manner interfere with the prosecution or defense of the litigation in the department without the consent of the justice of the justice court, nor shall it be necessary to summon witnesses.

I’m guessing you got luck and most justices consent?

Why would you guess that? Most justices concern themselves with statute.

This is just so inaccurate, at least for California.

I've been thinking for a while that a coordinated and massive action against a specific company by people all claiming damages in small claims court would be a very effective way of bringing that company to heel.

I wonder how that will work with mandatory arbitration clauses. Guess you don't know until you try.

Swimmingly. It apparently works swimmingly.[0]

Another idea that's worth investigating are coordinated payment strikes on leveraged companies that offer monthly services like telco companies. A bunch of their customers going "Oops, guess I can't afford to pay this month, gonna have to eat that 2% late fee next month, or maybe the month after that, or maybe the month after that" on a service that won't be disconnected in the first month could absolutely crush a company that requires that monthly income to pay their debt.

[0] https://jacobin.com/2022/05/mass-arbitration-mandatory-agree...

I was under the impression that the Supreme Court had ruled that mandatory arbitration clauses were indeed mandatory. Meaning, if you are subject to a mandatory arbitration clause in some contract, it removes ALL ability for a plaintiff to sue a company.

But, good news, it seems like they are walking back on that. They recently ruled that lower courts must "pause" a suit and the suit can resume if an agreement is not made through arbitration.

https://www.bressler.com/news-supreme-court-clarifies-mandat...

Valve tried this. But there's no class action arbitration. Meaning that instead of a single class action suit, they had thousands of individual arbitration cases and they were actually begging people to sue them instead. So we could just do that. If they want mandatory arbitration they can have mandatory arbitration. From half of us, just in case it doesn't work.

And now your Gmail account has been deleted as well as any other accounts you had with Google

That's okay, you have backup of your data, and you don't really depend on your Gmail account for anything important.

I’ve probably got about a thousand accounts that use a Gmail account as the associated email / username. I doubt this is uncommon compared to the number of people with custom domains.

The problem here wouldn't be the data but all the people whose only (or at least primary) way to reach you is the Gmail address.

So what? Why would you want to continue to use the services of a company you had to sue? That’s kind of a “burning the bridges” moment.

The whole problem is vendor lock in. Changing your email address if you’ve had it long is not straightforward or easy.

Do small claims apply to things like this where damages are indirect?

I believe so. For me it was helpful to visualize getting up and convincing the judge of the damages.

I’d run a PnL, get average daily income from visitors, then claim that loss as damages. In court I’d bring a simple spreadsheet showing the hole in income as evidence of damages.

If there were contractors to help get the site back up I’d claim their payments as damages and include their invoices as evidence.

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