Why is this the journalist’s fault? Don’t offer an unlimited plan if you don’t want people using it.
I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.
I believe most companies don't offer unlimited plans anymore these days. And Google probably removed theirs because of use cases like this.
Fault isn't what's being assigned. Just that sometimes people offer deals that have no explicit limits except that the deal terms say that either party can exit at any time.
Then once the deal moves out of the band where it is mutually beneficial, one party invokes the terms and exits the deal.
Idk if that’s always the case. I still have unlimited data plan from my mobile provider, from 2008ish. $50 for unlimited data (no it’s not rate limited either).
Obviously the cellular provider hates this but they can’t remove something I’m paying for and haven’t broken the contract. They do try to get me off the plan several times a year offering new phones fully paid if I switched.
Fuck them, I paid for it and I’m not going to leave. It’s not my fault a multi billion dollar corporation didn’t get one over me.
I’m glad I live in an area with good protections against this corporate abuse.
Absolutely disgusting what Google has done. I’ll keep this in mind 5 years from now when I have the power to spend real money on budgets and ensure that I never give Google a cent of it.
It takes decades to build a reputation and minutes to destroy it. Google has destroyed theirs.
I don't think this "my fault" / their fault is a useful way of thinking for enterprise decisions. For my part, I was and am in charge of cloud (and on-prem) purchasing decisions and I don't like to consider these things binary. Counterparty risk is just an additional cost to consider.
We use Alibaba Cloud, GCP, and most of all AWS. About December last year, Alibaba Cloud had a full zone outage as their datacenter provider had complete air-conditioning failure. One of the first things to go were the switches plugged into Express Connect (their feature to allow you to have direct links to their cloud through your network provider) and we had backup access set. We didn't get all of our stuff shut down but it helped.
But developing and maintaining backup access costs something. When we egress from S3 to our on-prem cluster, that's a cost. Vendor continuity and substitutability is just a cost like that. It's up to the guy managing this to model each of these risks and no enterprise vendor will sign an unlimited liability contract so you're going to have to land somewhere reasonable here. I always make sure to have exit clauses for us, and I try to ensure vendor exit clauses are what I'm comfortable with and appropriately priced.
Ultimately, you'll just have to read what you sign and have good counsel. But that's just what's worked for me. If you find the blacklist model more successful, more power to you.
I have to think the only reason why the journalist hasn’t sued Google for breach of contract is fear of more retribution from Google. Imagine getting banned from YouTube, not appearing in search queries, or not having access to your gmail after winning in small claims court.
It’s disgusting and shows why big tech needs to be broken up. Google, like others, are abusing their position. It’s not healthy for a competitive market.