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Comment by cogman10 | Hacker News Reader

You can call the ToS draconian, yes.

Just because something is in the ToS doesn't mean it's reasonable.

Why is it unreasonable?

It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling. Don’t want to use their tooling? Pay the API rates. The API is sitting right there, ready to use for a broader range of purposes.

It’s only unreasonable if you think the customer has a right to have their cake and eat it too.

I think the permaban without notification on first violation (that most violators likely weren't even aware was a violation) is unreasonable. This should almost certainly be illegal if it is not already under the DSA or similar, particularly for a monopolist of Google's scale.

What about this ban is anticompetitive? The only think I can think of is accusing them of dumping product (as opposed to price discrimination), in which case the remedy is going to be to making them charge the API price for everything.

The issue with them being a monopolist is less about competition and more about the fact them penalizing you on one of their products can result in them deleting you from the Internet. You can lose decades of email history, the ability to publish apps on over half of the mobile devices on the globe, etc.

In Europe the Digital Services Act (DSA) is beginning to set expectations, particularly for large platforms about not just clear documentation of their terms, but also a meaningful human appeal process with transparency and communication requirements for actions taken.

The DSA is more focused on social networks, but if you were to apply the concepts of the DSA to this story, Google would have violated it several times over.

Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.

The tech industry has gorged on non-participation in this facet of contract law, instead resorting to all or nothing clickwrap, which is, barring existential or egregious circumstances, unwarranted, and in my opinion, is fundamentally unreasonable, and should be an invalid exercise of contract law. Especially given the size of one of the party's in comparison to the other.

> Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.

They didn't change the agreement. One party violated it, and the other party withdrew as a result.

This is so vanilla. But people will moan because they want subsidized tokens.

I don't have a pony in this race my good poster, I just calls it how I see it, and I have a long history of calling out the fundamentally abusive character on non-negotiable one way contracting, and the ill effects it has on society.

Only people moaning here seem to be a bunch of wannabe Google PO's upset that people are handing machines a data construct they are designed to accept, and the machine is accepting, and using the token the way they were designed. Looks for some reason Google appears to resent that their lack of automating checks to deny those OAuth tokens is being utilized, and seems to think termination of customers who could probably be corrected with a simple message is the most reasonable response.

With instincts like that, it makes me happy everyday that for my needs, I can make do with doing things on my own hardware I've collected over the years. The Cloud has too much drama potential tied up in it.

> It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling.

Yes, because you are giving them your data. So you're not actually paying for usage. What they should do instead is be upfront about why this is subsidized and/or not subsidize it in the first place.

A flat rate is always a mixture of low usage people subsidizing high usage people. It's disgusting that these companies want to have the advantages of subs, but then straight up ban any high usage people. Basically, there is no flatrate.

We can debate on the policy.

The punishment, of being kicked out of your Google account for a zero-tolerance first offense, is completely unreasonable, is incredibly extreme Lawful Evil alignment.

The damage to individuals that Google is willing to just hand out here, to customers they have had for decades, who have their lives built around Google products, is absurd. This is criminally bad behavior and whatever the terms of service say, this is an affront to the dignity of man. This is evil. And beyond any conceivable reason.

Edit: perhaps not the entire account is locked? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330

> this is an affront to the dignity of man

This right here is an insane take to the opposite direction. Abuse, violence, torture, war, oppression, these are affronts to the dignity of man. Being kicked off a service from one business is absolutely not. It’s an inconvenience, but does not determine whether you will have bodily integrity.

By this logic, eviction from an apartment is a torture regardless of what the tenant did.

Given how many accounts folks sign up for with their Google account, it very well could mean losing access to bear every single account you have online. That could be an enormously difficult travail.

Yes I think there's many situations where being kicked out of your apartment would be an affront. If this made up crime of jaywalking got folks kicked out? Yes that would be an affront.

I'm willing to taper my outrage down some. Are you willing to come up some?

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