I'm beginning to think that the law needs to be that if there are such egregious terms of service, then the company needs to pay for the consumer's attorney at litigation, no matter the cause of litigation, and no matter the outcome.

I don't have a formal contract with my electricity and water provider; why should there be a dozen pages or longer contract for an email/ISP/Phone provider? Email, Internet, Phones are essential services. Insurance might fall into the same bucket in civilized nations.

> It’s a subsidized price; conditional to using their tooling.

Yes, because you are giving them your data. So you're not actually paying for usage. What they should do instead is be upfront about why this is subsidized and/or not subsidize it in the first place.

I think the permaban without notification on first violation (that most violators likely weren't even aware was a violation) is unreasonable. This should almost certainly be illegal if it is not already under the DSA or similar, particularly for a monopolist of Google's scale.

We can debate on the policy.

The punishment, of being kicked out of your Google account for a zero-tolerance first offense, is completely unreasonable, is incredibly extreme Lawful Evil alignment.

The damage to individuals that Google is willing to just hand out here, to customers they have had for decades, who have their lives built around Google products, is absurd. This is criminally bad behavior and whatever the terms of service say, this is an affront to the dignity of man. This is evil. And beyond any conceivable reason.

Edit: perhaps not the entire account is locked? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47116330

Tradition warrants a negotiation phase when one party wishes to change the terms of an agreement, or becomes cognizant that the counterparty may wish to do the same.

The tech industry has gorged on non-participation in this facet of contract law, instead resorting to all or nothing clickwrap, which is, barring existential or egregious circumstances, unwarranted, and in my opinion, is fundamentally unreasonable, and should be an invalid exercise of contract law. Especially given the size of one of the party's in comparison to the other.

A flat rate is always a mixture of low usage people subsidizing high usage people. It's disgusting that these companies want to have the advantages of subs, but then straight up ban any high usage people. Basically, there is no flatrate.

You can run an entire apartment block off of a single sim card/phone line. The (technical) problem is that you are purchasing an insufficient amount of bandwidth. It goes without saying that a limited bandwidth integrated over a finite service period comes out to a limited amount of data, so the term is misleading.

If google has no obligation to provide the service tier, then they should stop providing it instead of providing it under false terms.

This is like if everyone in a city decided to take baths instead of showers, so the municpal water supply decided to ban baths instead of properly segmenting their service based on usage.

Service providers don't have the right to discriminate what their service is used for.

It rather sounds like you are arguing for the acceptance of weasel words in marketing.

Unlimited means just that. Otherwise, there are limits, and the word “unlimited” does not apply.