Comment by notepad0x90
9 hours ago
This is such a repetitious issue that I wonder why there has been no class action suits so far?
I think documenting these cases somewhere, and targeting not just Alphabet but all the other "we're too big to support little people like you" companies would be a good idea. I don't think the pay out would be significant, but the punitive impact might change things.
OP is not clear , but it looks like GCP suspension not Google one (I.e email android etc)
All clouds reject a lot of businesses for their services for variety of reasons and there are alternatives in the market unlike say a Google account suspension .
I don’t think class action is feasible for cloud computing suspension (unless of course they are discriminating against a protected class etc)
i was thinking more in terms of tort law or contract law. They probably have a disclaimer and Tos that addresses all that, but given enough plaintiffs and their market dominance, it might amount to possible deliberate/calculated financial harm. It might be enough to not get thrown out of court at least. They can reject business for any reason, but once someone relies on their services for their business, there is always a certain expectation of continued service, and in the event of service termination, they may not need to explain themselves, but they must accommodate reasonable requests to transfer data, customers,etc.. elsewhere. Otherwise it sounds like tortiuous interference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
> Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when one person intentionally damages someone else's contractual or business relationships with a third party, causing economic harm.
In this case, people who use GCP have customers and other contractual relationships. Google's termination of service interfered with that. Google also doing this as a matter of standard business practice indicates that they are aware that their action will interfere with people's contractual obligations (well common sense should tell them that anyways).
You can't force someone to sign a contract with you that says "if I interfere with your future contracts with arbitrary third parties on purpose, you can't sue me". The deliberate part is crucial from what I understand. If their decision making couldn't have accounted for the interference, and the interference wasn't calculated as an acceptable risk, there is no issue. But the plaintiffs can claim that repeated social media posts and acknowledgements of said interference by Google over the years means it's enough grounds for a suit. and a suit will mean discovery, google will have go hand over internal documents, depose employees,etc...
In the end, this might be more costly to companies like Google than just giving customers a grace period to move elsewhere before termination.
Obligatory: IANAL, I'm just a guy using big words I barely understand.
Of all the posts like this I’ve seen the customers are always 1) extremely scant on details about what they were using GCP for or why they were suspended, and more importantly 2) never actually paying for support.
Having worked with a fair few academics, I’m guessing they lost track of their service account keys and the account got suspended for crypto mining.
There have been plenty of posts where the reason was apparent. One i recall was caused by a guy having malware on his phone, and he happened to use a work email on his phone, so the entire GWS organization was banned, shutting down the company's operations.
I have yet to see someone say why they were suspended.
I’ve always wondered why, this makes sense.
> but the punitive impact might change things
Call me cynical but I have little to no hope that even class actions would solve anything. These companies have become so big that they can take one class action after another for years to come without making a dent in their financials and without bringing any change to their operating procedures.
I'm just expecting them to change their calculus. Right now it costs them nothing to randomly shut down accounts. If it had some cost, perhaps some minor notice, accommodation,etc.. however automated might be worth just the man hours spent on lawsuits.