7 ms·

How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they call

How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.

t-writescode 6y ago
Tragedy of the Commons.
- risho 6y ago
  it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try to exploit it then google will either resolve the issue or go bankrupt. either way the problem solves itself.
  - topkai22 6y ago
    Just because it’s owned by a private entity doesn’t automatically exclude it from being a common.
    - samoa42 6y ago
      yes it does
  - kortilla 6y ago
    “commons - land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community.“ It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
    - risho 6y ago
      https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp >A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to. Google owns their hard drive space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons >The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
      - kortilla 6y ago
        By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system. The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective. > Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
        lmm 6y ago
        > By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. > The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
        kortilla 6y ago
        It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Even in Native American tribes they made rules about how to use different areas. The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
        lmm 6y ago
        > It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted. The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.
remus 6y ago
I'm not a fan of products that pretend to be unlimited (because nothing is infinite, so no one can actually offer you unlimited anything), but it's kinda obvious that there's gonna be a long tail of users who's usage is orders of magnitude higher than average which make the offering unviable.
- causality0 6y ago
  Exactly. The people paying $12/month and storing petabytes on their servers is just punishment for hyperbolic advertising. If you offer "unlimited videogame streaming" you can't act surprised when some people decide to play World of Warcraft in 8K for 22 hours a day.
  - pb7 6y ago
    I’m sure the terms of use reserves the right to discontinue service to anyone for any reason. You can do that but you’ll likely be cut off and have no recourse.
    - kadoban 6y ago
      Fair enough, as far as that goes. But at some point isn't that just false advertising? Where's the punishment for that, or if you don't think there punishment, isn't it at least a pretty poor way to start a business relationship?
      - pb7 6y ago
        I don't think it can be construed as false advertising as long as the contract is carried out (i.e. if you sign up for unlimited for a year, they offer you that until the year ends). Perhaps Google doesn't see it as a good business relationship either if you're in the 99.999th percentile of usage.
      - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
        > at some point isn't that just false advertising? You want one term interpreted literally and the other figuratively? No.
rodgerd 6y ago
The data hoarders sub is full of people who brag about breaking storage services, so I'd call that abuse.
- vultour 6y ago
  The entitlement is quite staggering, as evidenced by the comment you replied to. This is like Cocal Cola putting a free refill station on the street and a bunch of people rolling up with tanker trucks, then getting upset when it's taken away.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    Except that it's not free, and Coke doesn't have to promise infinity if it isn't offering it.
    - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
      Google didn't offer Unlimited either. It's limited to 1Tb but they never enforced it.
    - bhelkey 6y ago
      In the US it is common for businesses to offer unlimited free refills on soda.
  - bleepblorp 6y ago
    The entitlement here comes from companies that lie about providing 'unlimited' services but whine about being taken advantage of when people actually use these 'unlimited' services. Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.
    - geodel 6y ago
      Yeah, just like the fraud millions of married couple run when they say "...Till death do us apart" and then proceed to divorce in few years.
Sohcahtoa82 6y ago
There's two things at stake here: 1. The letter of the service being offered 2. The spirit of the service being offered Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here... Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction. But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.
- kadoban 6y ago
  I wouldn't agree that that's abuse. I'd say that it's a bad business model, and I'd be wary of a scam, but it's not abuse. A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!" B: "Ok, here's all my data." A: "Abuse!" Doesn't really make sense to me.
  - esyir 6y ago
    Think of it less of legalese and more in terms of human speech and it becomes a bit more understandable why there some people consider this fine. "help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Number 2 doesn't really exist. It simply means lying about the service you're offering when you really intend to offer a lesser service. All so you don't have to say "practically unlimited" or "virtually unlimited" in your marketing copy.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
If you got to a store that has "unlimited" refills for drinks and you go and bring in a set of 40L drums to fill up, thats abusing the service. You know this is a gross overuse of the service which was intended for normal users to fill a drink a few times. I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising. Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it
- mota7 6y ago
  Can't up-vote this hard enough!
- dingaling 6y ago
  > You know this is a gross overuse of the service How do you know that? Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?
- causality0 6y ago
  Filling 40L drums is not covered by the offer since it's free refills, not free fills. You can only refill the container they give you already filled.
  - labawi 6y ago
    If you want to get technical, it's getting a glass and repeatedly pouring it in the drum for - you know, office party, next year of binge drinking or whatever. If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.
- 6y ago

How is it abuse when you're using the service as advertised? Google didn't call it "a reasonably large amount of storage, sufficient for most people", they called it unlimited.

t-writescode 6y ago

Tragedy of the Commons.

risho 6y ago
it isn't a commons if it's owned by a corporation. there is no tragedy of the commons here, because google bears the consequences of these rules. if people try to exploit it then google will either resolve the issue or go bankrupt. either way the problem solves itself.
- topkai22 6y ago
  Just because it’s owned by a private entity doesn’t automatically exclude it from being a common.
  - samoa42 6y ago
    yes it does
- kortilla 6y ago
  “commons - land or resources belonging to or affecting the whole of a community.“ It does not have to belong to the community to be a commons. It just has to affect the entire community.
  - risho 6y ago
    https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/common-resource.asp >A common resource (or the "commons") is any scarce resource, such as water or pasture, that provides users with tangible benefits but which nobody in particular owns or has exclusive claim to. Google owns their hard drive space. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commons >The commons is the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water, and a habitable earth. These resources are held in common, not owned privately. Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. You aren't entitled to access to googles hard disk space.
    - kortilla 6y ago
      By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. The important bit for a tragedy of the commons is that the users don’t have any meaningful ownership or motivation to fix the system. The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. Be it the government or a faceless company that doesn’t charge for it, it doesn’t make any difference from an economic perspective. > Google owns their hard drive space. Also a commons has the implication of everyone having access to access said resource. No it doesn’t. A commons has the implication that everyone in a particular community has access to something. A tragedy of the commons can easily occur within completely gated communities with the commons owned by a private corporation.
      - lmm 6y ago
        > By that “no true Scotsman” definition, there are very few commons. All land is owned by someone and there are still tragedy of the commons scenarios. > The town commons where people grazed their livestock was literally owned by the government. That's not really true; the pre-enclosure commons simply wasn't owned in the sense we'd understand it today, just as Native American land was administered in ways we wouldn't recognise as ownership. Treating land as akin to chattel is a relatively recent development.
        kortilla 6y ago
        It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Even in Native American tribes they made rules about how to use different areas. The critical relationship in the tragedy of the commons is misaligned incentives between the users and the owners. Users have incentive to act greedy and the owner has no incentive to fix it because it doesn’t hurt them if the thing stops being useful for that activity.
        lmm 6y ago
        > It was owned in the sense that mattered. A governing body could make changes to the land or its use if it cared. Not really. Often there was simply no entity that exercised executive function over the land or its use, which is a large part of why even plainly dysfunctional arrangements persisted. The idea that there must be an owner to incentivise is modern and ahistorical. As traditionally conceived, the tragedy occurs not because "the owner" has the wrong incentives but because there simply isn't an owner. Pre-modern states didn't have the capacity to administer land in that kind of detail, even if they'd wanted to.

remus 6y ago

I'm not a fan of products that pretend to be unlimited (because nothing is infinite, so no one can actually offer you unlimited anything), but it's kinda obvious that there's gonna be a long tail of users who's usage is orders of magnitude higher than average which make the offering unviable.

causality0 6y ago
Exactly. The people paying $12/month and storing petabytes on their servers is just punishment for hyperbolic advertising. If you offer "unlimited videogame streaming" you can't act surprised when some people decide to play World of Warcraft in 8K for 22 hours a day.
- pb7 6y ago
  I’m sure the terms of use reserves the right to discontinue service to anyone for any reason. You can do that but you’ll likely be cut off and have no recourse.
  - kadoban 6y ago
    Fair enough, as far as that goes. But at some point isn't that just false advertising? Where's the punishment for that, or if you don't think there punishment, isn't it at least a pretty poor way to start a business relationship?
    - pb7 6y ago
      I don't think it can be construed as false advertising as long as the contract is carried out (i.e. if you sign up for unlimited for a year, they offer you that until the year ends). Perhaps Google doesn't see it as a good business relationship either if you're in the 99.999th percentile of usage.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > at some point isn't that just false advertising? You want one term interpreted literally and the other figuratively? No.

rodgerd 6y ago

The data hoarders sub is full of people who brag about breaking storage services, so I'd call that abuse.

vultour 6y ago
The entitlement is quite staggering, as evidenced by the comment you replied to. This is like Cocal Cola putting a free refill station on the street and a bunch of people rolling up with tanker trucks, then getting upset when it's taken away.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Except that it's not free, and Coke doesn't have to promise infinity if it isn't offering it.
  - JustFinishedBSG 6y ago
    Google didn't offer Unlimited either. It's limited to 1Tb but they never enforced it.
  - bhelkey 6y ago
    In the US it is common for businesses to offer unlimited free refills on soda.
- bleepblorp 6y ago
  The entitlement here comes from companies that lie about providing 'unlimited' services but whine about being taken advantage of when people actually use these 'unlimited' services. Advertising a service that a supplier has no intention of providing is called fraud.
  - geodel 6y ago
    Yeah, just like the fraud millions of married couple run when they say "...Till death do us apart" and then proceed to divorce in few years.

Sohcahtoa82 6y ago

There's two things at stake here: 1. The letter of the service being offered 2. The spirit of the service being offered Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here... Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction. But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.

kadoban 6y ago
I wouldn't agree that that's abuse. I'd say that it's a bad business model, and I'd be wary of a scam, but it's not abuse. A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!" B: "Ok, here's all my data." A: "Abuse!" Doesn't really make sense to me.
- esyir 6y ago
  Think of it less of legalese and more in terms of human speech and it becomes a bit more understandable why there some people consider this fine. "help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home
pessimizer 6y ago
Number 2 doesn't really exist. It simply means lying about the service you're offering when you really intend to offer a lesser service. All so you don't have to say "practically unlimited" or "virtually unlimited" in your marketing copy.
thatguy0900 6y ago
It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago

If you got to a store that has "unlimited" refills for drinks and you go and bring in a set of 40L drums to fill up, thats abusing the service. You know this is a gross overuse of the service which was intended for normal users to fill a drink a few times. I think its a little less clear for ISPs where large amounts of data usage is normal for average users but in the case of storage, people dumping petabytes of data they don't even care about is clearly misuse. If the drink place stepped in to stop you after 5 drinks that would probably be false advertising. Yes maybe Google was wrong about calling it unlimited and now they are fixing that by making it not unlimited. That doesn't change the fact that people were actually misusing it

mota7 6y ago
Can't up-vote this hard enough!
dingaling 6y ago
> You know this is a gross overuse of the service How do you know that? Turn the tables; say that as a customer you agree to a company charging you an unlimited fee each month for a service. Do you think they'd charge just $1 because they 'know' you didn't mean all of your salary?
causality0 6y ago
Filling 40L drums is not covered by the offer since it's free refills, not free fills. You can only refill the container they give you already filled.
- labawi 6y ago
  If you want to get technical, it's getting a glass and repeatedly pouring it in the drum for - you know, office party, next year of binge drinking or whatever. If you offer unlimited and only give 2 drinks / person, you're lying, shame on you. If you drink more than 10 people combined, you're drunk with questionable social compass. When you take more than 100 or even 1000 people, then you are technically correct - the best kind of correct for a sociopath.
6y ago