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Comment by ch0wn | Hacker News Reader

This should be illegal. If a contractor your hired to swap out a tile on your bathroom floor billed you for remodelling your back garden, you would obviously have the legal right to refuse that.

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Not if your contractor had you first sign a 15 page contract that commits you to whatever costs they dream up and requires forced arbitration by a corporate friendly firm when any dispute arises.

Because that's somehow normal in today's tech world.

So if their TOS say they can also rape my cat, then I cannot do anything about it, right? Ridiculous

In jurisdictions where beastiality is legal, then yes, from the libertarian perspective, that's all freedom of contract, baby. I'm not defending either beastiality or libertarianism, but the logic is that you don't want the government deciding what two private entities can and can't freely agree to.

We're pretty far from the Lochner era in the US, where even minimum wage laws were held to be unconstitutional violations of a very broad view of freedom to contract. But it is still a principle in most legal system.

Slightly OT, but I've always taken a dim view of this sort of thing for consumers because the parties are never at equal parity, either in ability to understand the legalese they're agreeing to, or the ability to seek alternatives.

Legal contracts for consumers should be written at whatever the prevailing reading level is, and the government should step in the more monopolistic position a company is in.

It infuriates me to no end how preferential government is towards corporations vs individuals.

Give me all your data and money plzthx

Dictated but not read,

big company

Alternatively (in emoji description form):

floppy disk, bar chart, right arrow, brain, money with wings, pointing finger, slightly smiling face

My guess is that at least in Europe they would have a good chance fighting this in court and getting their money back, but it’s a pain having to go through such a lawsuit.

Your analogy is well off.

You hire a contractor and agree they'll bill you per tile, regardless of how many tiles there are. They bill you per tile. End of story.

For a more acurate comparison, consider a utility. You agree to pay for your electic bill. It's not the utility's fault you invited all your friends who decided to run a crypto mining LAN party, and they can't cut you off lightly because it might literally kill you (e.g. you live in a hot place and rely on AC to stay alive).

When people created firebase keys years ago they did not expect or imagine these keys would become valid for AI that didn’t exist years down the line.

"We can either charge per tile, per job or on demand. Or you can have us on call for a year and get any of the former at a discounted rate." "Per tile. Lay tiles until I say stop" >you fall asleep "Wtf why are you still laying tile" "You said per tile and lay until you say stop. That'll be 50k please"

How is this the contractors fault?

The cloud services wrote the contract and the UI for their console. They then encourage young developers to try out their tools and encourage a market environment where those skills are needed to secure employment. Some kid goes and tries to build their first web app, they follow instructions and tutorials but miss that a single default selection on a menu three nested layers down is going to cost $2,000 per month. This isn’t disclosed on the page. Sure, it can be determined by reading several different documents, but the provider chose to not show estimates for costs in the setup.

How is that the kid’s fault?

"Can you lay tiles until I say stop, or until it's about $250 worth, whichever comes first"

"No, as one of the top tile layers in the country I can't do that, for your own protection. What if fifty elephants came and wanted to use your bathroom all at once? You'd feel pretty dumb having to reject them instead of me simply automatically adding $1 million to your bill"

But in this example, the last line of your story is the customer going “yeah, sounds good, let’s do it and hope that doesn’t happen” and signing the agreement.

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