Comment by Cthulhu_
11 hours ago
It's always possible to sue, but Google has good terms of service and lawyers - I'm 99% confident that a lawsuit would end up nowhere.
11 hours ago
It's always possible to sue, but Google has good terms of service and lawyers - I'm 99% confident that a lawsuit would end up nowhere.
They have every right to sue, and if they did sue they almost certainly would win. This is clear breach of contract. The only argument Google could make is "they did something to violate our agreement" but they'd have to prove that, and then have a damn good explanation for why they were in the right to suspend the account without any outreach. Unless Railway did something egregious, Google clearly made an error.
But that's not what will happen. Google will offer an apology (perhaps even a public one), a giant pile of account credit, and a pinky promise not to do it again. Railway will accept it and hmmm and haw internally about whether to decrease their reliance on GCP, and then when they calculate the cost of going in on other clouds more heavily (or their own metal), they'll just think harder about weird failure modes.
I'm sure their contract explicitly states that their account can be suspended or terminated immediately without prior notice upon violating some TOS. And, most TOS are incredibly wide and vague, it wouldn't necessarily be hard to find something they violated.
This is sort of the problem with these new-age internet companies. The contracts are incredibly hostile. Most TOS you see amount to "you have no rights and we can fuck you up the ass"
Google is a B2C company so I'm sure some of that culture transfers over to B2B relations, but I'm speculating. Maybe the contracts are more normal for B2B.
If Railway's account was suspended due to an error, not a TOS violation, I doubt they'll pull such a card. If Google were sued, such a blatant lie would be found in discovery pretty quickly and I doubt a court would look upon it favourably. They'd also be starting a public PR battle that they'd almost certainly lose (assuming there was indeed no real TOS violation) which would make them look completely untrustworthy. So I doubt Google will do that.
bastawhiz is probably right in that Google will offer some credits and an apology, and Railway will reduce their dependence (probably), rather than a lawsuit. And I doubt Railway wants to be on the bad side of one of the few big cloud providers. But I'd be surprised if Railway didn't have a good argument to make for compensation or a lawsuit.
[dead]
One company I worked at is highly reliant on Google Cloud, but at one point we moved some services to Azure.
Azure noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of getting more of our business.
Google noticed, and immediately hit us with a discount offer in the hopes of keeping more of our business.
This is just a reminder that your multi-cloud strategy doesn't have to be 'deploy everything across multiple clouds'; it can even just be 'make it obvious that you have leverage'.