Google suspended my company's Google cloud account for the third time

I've never talked to anyone outside of tech circles like this that has any inkling that Google just shutters people's digital lives with no warning or recourse.

In general, with any kind of mainstream large company, you should assume that the overall public perception of them is that they're fine, of course, if they weren't why would they be so big and popular??

    > Haha, what "people"?

You should see the sideways looks I get from people when they find out I backup all our gmail to another service and don't allow employees to use Google SSO logins for sites. Just encase googles 'fraud' bots randomly shut down our workspace. I don't want the entire business to ground to a halt because we can't login to any sites.

Trouble is that whilst many have realized that Google (like much of Big Tech) is the quintessential example of a Poisoned Chalice they remain all too aware they've little choice but to endure or risk unavoidable abuse.

The tragedy of the modern internet is that these monopolies have reduced competition and choice to irrelevancies.

It would take thousands, at least, with top training and the breathing space to actually engage with customers individually. Mind you Google should still do it in my opinion.

I've been on the Fediverse for nearly a decade. I've jumped instances a few times. I'm currently with an instance run by a friend I've known online for well over a decade, who does have a strict moderation approach, but is also reachable out-of-band and is quite responsive and principled.

On Reddit, Google, FB, etc., you've got a single provider, and if they freeze you out you are fully frozen out.

1. Some designated entity decides who gets hidden from everyone's feed. (Google is here)

2. Everyone decides on their own, who they want to hide from their own feeds.

2a. The same but they can also form voluntary groups that share ignore-lists between each other. (Fediverse is here)

3. You can't hide spammers from your feed.

1 is vulnerable to the entity being corrupt (they always turn corrupt) - let's say 5% of global ignore list entries are there for corrupt reasons.

2a has the exact same problem but it's separately per ignore list group, perhaps each individual ignore list has 5% corrupt entries on average, which conversely means that every person is on about 5% of the ignore lists for corrupt reasons. Instead of 5% of the people being on 100% of the lists, now 100% of people are on 5% of the lists (except the spammers who are on 95%) which may give an impression the system is more corrupt than option 1.

The other options, 2 and 3, mean you're constantly bombarded by spam so you give up and quit the platform entirely.

This problem is unsolvable.

For example, the old Uber with the crazy thing they did. What if in the alternate universe they straight up got banned? That’s it. All investments would go to zero.

Lots of businesses can fail at any time. People still run them and work for them as long as it makes money, and WHEN it stops working, they stop that and do something else to make money. All business is ephemeral.

Businesses want to make money on the apps people want.

Businesses exchange money for goods and services.

You exchange money for food and shelter.

So Mary from legal walks over to Manager whoever and says "Hey why the fuck did you terminate this guys account? Now I have to go to court."

Account reinstated. You drop the case.

This produces stupidly improved results.

If enough people started making companies show up to small claims court for their shitty behaviour maybe they wouldn't act so shitty.

covers some situations where someone stops you for making money, for no good reason.

"As an example, someone could ... obstruct someone's ability to honor a contract with a client by deliberately refusing to deliver necessary goods."

In this case:

1: SSLMate is a paying customer. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

2: Google harmed SSLMate, and their customers, by deliberately interrupting the services that were paid for.

The big question is if SSLMate was following the terms of service. If SSLMate was actually violating the terms, then it's a hard case to make. Otherwise, Google violated the contract and harmed SSLMate, and is therefore a valid target in US court.

I guess a lawyer can argue against this, but I'd say that losing access to a lifetime if mails is absolutely up there with "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

And from my own experience building software for government services, I can tell you this: In my experience in those systems it is not acceptable to just have a list where someone clicks “deny” all day. Or allow for that matter. We tried with a system were the rule is that the citizen gets <think they apply for> whenever all relevant demands are met. Legal was very clear: No automated decisions either way unless the relevant laws or regulations explicitly allow it, every case has to be reviewed independently — even when the outcome seems completely obvious to anyone who knows the field.

They do not want "slightly less money", they want as much money as possible

Blaspheme!

But it adds a human interaction and that costs money so… no! Suspend.

I don't like this. I too have looked like an attack on their models using things inside the customer-side of google, took special relationships to get over this, an ongoing threat to how we relate to them.

(it's not in GCP btw. different arc of the megaplex)

Note that doesn't mean you have to do it all yourself, there are plenty of hosting places that you can just configure with your own domain name details.

Simple example - in the early days of Microsoft Office, every new release would cause office confusion. I learned to say "it's the same product, they just moved things around". My conspiratorial sense was that the confusion was intentional to make users feel lost.

I can't help but think of the mass banning they did of people who spammed emoji in chat for a game streamer by request to vote on which direction he should choose who only got unbanned because he has a big enough following to cause bad PR. I can't imagine being in a position where you depended on Google not banning you for your livelihood. Sure you'd have separate accounts, but it's pretty much guaranteed Google knows they're connected and what's to prevent the shriek of "circumvention!" followed by banning all of them?

If you had actually read the post you would have understood there are ways to ditch GCP, but they are perceived as cumbersome.

The exaple is OpenID Connect. It works well with Azure (according to the post).

I'm sorry to say this, but the author is choosing something easy but unrealiable over something a bit more complicated but reliable.

It's really the author's fault. They are choosing their comfort over the service reliability (and keeping promises made to customers).

Heck they might even go with api keys. They could give explicit direction on the minimal amount of permissions the api key would need and they could ping the users each 3-4 months to rotate them.

But no, I guess we'll have another post at some point about the fourth (definitive?) account suspension.