Comment by mabbo
5 years ago
Always remember: if you aren't paying a company to use their services, you aren't a customer- you're the product.
Google does not care about non-paying customers individually. They have literally billions of them. They're easily replaceable and provide roughly the same amount of value each- not much, but worth lots in aggregate. If Google were to have a human review all the complaints from the non-paying customers, then they would become a small cost each rather than a small profit each.
Google's only option is to start assessing which people are dangerous to offend and then provide just those people additional customer support. I'm sure there won't be any social consequences of that though.
He mentions having purchased thousands of dollars of apps on the play store. You're not wrong about nonpaying customers being the product, it's just not relevant to this story.
The catch is that having a Google Account is free. Whether or not you made Play Store purchases isn't relevant to the people who handle accounts or (for example) automated gmail bans. And as it happens, if the gmail team decides to ban you, it cascades to the services where you spent money.
That's conjecture though. You don't know which team decided to ban him. You don't know whether he pays for a G Suites, or expanded Drive storage.
1 reply →
This is insightful and it explains pretty much everything.
One thing that doesn't make sense is that there are many acounts (but a small percentage of the total) that do make google money individually. Accounts that own popular apps, for example. Accounts that control Google Cloud accounts, for another. There is absolutely no reason those accounts should be auto-banned with zero human interaction, even upon appeal.