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I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies com

I would want any company that is abusing their power to face consequences. However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong and their only cards to play are hoping for a political reaction, rather than suing Google in court and being exposed for why they were actually banned.

jacquesm 7y ago
Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point. If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.
- techntoke 7y ago
  It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits. They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence. I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
- ddalex 7y ago
  > optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
- v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
  Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right? The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    The problem here is the assumption that scaling up is inherently good and okay, and not being able to enforce good behavior at a certain scale is just an unfortunate and unavoidable result. If enforcement can't be managed at that scale, things of that scale should be shut down. Platforms are not an inherent good.
    - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
      I don’t know. Take YouTube. For all its faults, it has enabled countless people to make a living, or helped artists get noticed. I personally feel having the option for everyone to publish content without prohibitive cost or other barriers is a massive achievement. Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way. Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place. So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.
devoply 7y ago
Court costs and lawyer fees are expensive, Google the monopoly can afford the best lawyers... So this is crying for a class action lawsuit with the best lawyers. When all is said and done it will be a slap on the wrist compared to Google's revenue. So unless the courts hand out huge punitive judgment it would not do much. And even if they do the parties effected will see a small fraction of their loss. Corporate psychopathy at its best or worst.
- techntoke 7y ago
  It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
  - devoply 7y ago
    The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man. Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system. It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
    - Fjolsvith 7y ago
      There's a scientific field I never heard of: Corporation Psychology
hos234 7y ago
No idea why this comment is getting downvoted. It's like an arms race out there, where every trick in the book is being used to manipulate people and capture their attention. Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could. There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner. Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined. At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix. When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.
- ArnoVW 7y ago
  The reason it is being downvoted it is because it is using lazy debating techniques. Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality. The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
- nathanyz 7y ago
  Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.
icebraining 7y ago
What would that lawsuit allege? Under contract law, companies have a right to terminate their dealings with others, for any or no reason. Maybe it would be good if there was a law restricting that for these platforms, but as far as I know, there isn't. So I don't see how a lawsuit could be successful.
- pnw_hazor 7y ago
  The claim could be something related to interfering with their business. "GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on. Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
  - nso 7y ago
    In many countries a ToS is not legally binding, as its not considered a legal contract.
  - astura 7y ago
    ...but its entirely legal (and reasonable) for a business to stop doing business with an entity simply because they feel like it. No matter if they entity was relying on the service or not. It happens all the time.
    - zaarn 7y ago
      Except contracts may state otherwise and a court might decide that the "I no longer want to do business" clause is invalid or not applicable. And except in my countries you certainly can't just stop doing business with someone, including a few European ones. Double if the other end is a private customer.
- EarthMephit 7y ago
  I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws) Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information
sireat 7y ago
The problem isn't Google punishing actors they deem "bad". Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady". The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation. Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works. Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process? We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue
Can_Not 7y ago
> However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.

jacquesm 7y ago

Sure. But it wouldn't surprise me one bit either if there was an active policy on the part of Google that optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world either. See, if a company can do something for years then the least thing you can do is explain why they've been banned, 'policy violation' is such a great fig-leaf for a lot of trickery that it should be a requirement to spell out exactly what the violation was unless the account was only a few days old and did not have a history of good behavior right up to that point. If Google wants to hide behind the mantra that they do not wish to tell the world what rules they have to avoid giving spammers an edge then they should improve their enforcement; not to send away the bulk of the complainants without a way to improve or some kind of dialogue.

techntoke 7y ago
It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits. They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence. I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.
ddalex 7y ago
> optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?
v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right? The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  The problem here is the assumption that scaling up is inherently good and okay, and not being able to enforce good behavior at a certain scale is just an unfortunate and unavoidable result. If enforcement can't be managed at that scale, things of that scale should be shut down. Platforms are not an inherent good.
  - v7p1Qbt1im 7y ago
    I don’t know. Take YouTube. For all its faults, it has enabled countless people to make a living, or helped artists get noticed. I personally feel having the option for everyone to publish content without prohibitive cost or other barriers is a massive achievement. Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way. Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place. So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.

devoply 7y ago

Court costs and lawyer fees are expensive, Google the monopoly can afford the best lawyers... So this is crying for a class action lawsuit with the best lawyers. When all is said and done it will be a slap on the wrist compared to Google's revenue. So unless the courts hand out huge punitive judgment it would not do much. And even if they do the parties effected will see a small fraction of their loss. Corporate psychopathy at its best or worst.

techntoke 7y ago
It sounds to me like the issue isn't so much with Google then, but that you don't believe the legal system is fair (which I generally agree), but that is a different issue entirely.
- devoply 7y ago
  The legal system has its own objectives, for instance dissuading people from even coming to the courts, they often enough don't coincide with the objectives of the little man. Psychopaths and corporations game the system as they have no morality. There isn't all that much the system can do about powerful forces gaming it. For instance car companies calculated that the cost of paying for injury lawsuits was less than recalling defective cars that were killing people. This is gaming the system. It would be interesting if the courts started finding corporations having psychological disorders and punishing them for it by for instance replacing their upper leadership if found to have certain tendencies which were socially unacceptable.
  - Fjolsvith 7y ago
    There's a scientific field I never heard of: Corporation Psychology

hos234 7y ago

No idea why this comment is getting downvoted. It's like an arms race out there, where every trick in the book is being used to manipulate people and capture their attention. Few years back I had an option to work on a recommendation system for a large video hosting service used by most media companies. They allowed me to spend two weeks with their engineering and sales teams. It was scary to say the least. The number of companies and layers of infrastructure all just mindlessly optimizing for ad clicks, watching viewers being bought and sold in real time like some kind of mad fish market, targeting of specific groups purely because they are hooked to the content rather than a valid target for the ad etc etc etc. I got out of there as fast as I could. There is a category of dumb people in the world, who don't have the capacity to understand how dumb they are, nor does humanity yet posses the skills to enlighten them in a timely and effective manner. Historically this group's stupidity has had localized effects. Today thanks to a global network they are hooked into, the effects of their mindlessness is amplified to levels no one has ever imagined. At the beginning they do what they are told to do or what people around them are doing. And if they get very good at it and you tell them to stop because its causing issues, they wont. They cant. There is nothing sophisticated, that can be done about them other than cutting access to the network. This will take decades to fix. When people sit around wondering (and coming up with all kinds of reasons which further obscure things) why they see random, inexplicable events happening all over the world, ask them to take a peak behind the curtain, at the mindless mega machine that is the ad serving ecosystem.

ArnoVW 7y ago
The reason it is being downvoted it is because it is using lazy debating techniques. Saying that "well but probably there are people that had it coming" does not add anything to the discussion. In fact it diminishes the quality. The article on the comments are talking about examples of people the affirm having being treated wrongly. If there are other cases of people that have been punished correctly or these cases are lying, then some sort of proof, at least implying that, would be in order.
nathanyz 7y ago
Agreed, this is all a form of weaponized AI being used by the private sector to influence, optimize, and profit. Using AI for these purposes is perfectly fine. But there needs to be a realization of the impact so that guidelines, checks, and balances can be put in place. There can be unintended consequences of these things that the AI doesn't care about since its playing for high-score in the game of attention, views, and profit.

icebraining 7y ago

What would that lawsuit allege? Under contract law, companies have a right to terminate their dealings with others, for any or no reason. Maybe it would be good if there was a law restricting that for these platforms, but as far as I know, there isn't. So I don't see how a lawsuit could be successful.

pnw_hazor 7y ago
The claim could be something related to interfering with their business. "GOOG agreed to provide my company a service that we have reasonably relied on"..."GOOG struck my app for no cause causing my business damage..." and so on. Though, in-real-life, people who use google services have probably agreed to terms to bar any such claim.
- nso 7y ago
  In many countries a ToS is not legally binding, as its not considered a legal contract.
- astura 7y ago
  ...but its entirely legal (and reasonable) for a business to stop doing business with an entity simply because they feel like it. No matter if they entity was relying on the service or not. It happens all the time.
  - zaarn 7y ago
    Except contracts may state otherwise and a court might decide that the "I no longer want to do business" clause is invalid or not applicable. And except in my countries you certainly can't just stop doing business with someone, including a few European ones. Double if the other end is a private customer.
EarthMephit 7y ago
I'm not a lawyer, but it feels like an abuse of monopoly power (Antitrust laws) Google sounds like they are using their control of the Android store to prevent an application being published that competes with their Google Maps Mobile App, which also offers similar public transport tracking and time-table information

sireat 7y ago

The problem isn't Google punishing actors they deem "bad". Many of the banned probably did something most of us (and they) deem "shady". The problem is Google's complete lack of transparency and super reliance on automation. Google's defense is that they do not want to give out even one bit of information so theoretically some bad actors could assemble a composite model on how Google banning algorithm works. Ok, but how about giving some sort of reasonable response and some sort of reasonable appeals process? We are rapidly heading to "Computer's Don't Argue" society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computers_Don%27t_Argue

Can_Not 7y ago

> However, it wouldn't surprise me one bit to find out that some of these companies complaining about getting banned are legitimately doing something wrong The issue is that they're not being told what they did wrong, which instantly puts Google in the wrong as far as in concerned.