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.
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
The service is intended for customers to drink as much as you want. That doesn't include filling up storage drums.
An unlimited storage offer is intended to store as much data as you want. The difference is that there is a low natural limit to how much you can drink.
People aren't wrong for storing unlimited amounts of data in the unlimited amount storage space they pay for. They don't have to evaluate if Google's offer makes business sense for it, that's Google's responsibility.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It's not abuse any more than using your $500/month insurance plan to cover a $12,000/month chemotherapy treatment is abuse. Advertising unlimited storage for $12 is Google saying "We bet the vast majority of our users don't need twelve dollars' worth of storage but will pay it anyway because they want one less thing to have to think about".
On the other hand, your insurance company would have strictly (and wisely, IMHO) defined how many millions worth of chemo your $500/month plan will buy you, or specifically what kinds of treatments will it pay for, and at what rates.
So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.
It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.
Unhelpful perspective, honestly. Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite. This is a distinction that adults don’t have to make except when they are perhaps talking to small children. And besides, it’s not like Google ever promised anyone “unlimited” anything. The contract says “unlimited, unless we decide to change something”. Getting up in arms about the literal wording while ignoring the fact that only the literal wording of the contract matters is also unhelpful.
Google disconnecting unprofitable users is not the issue. They of course have that right, as stipulated in the terms of service. The point of contention is whether it's fair to call abnormally high use "abuse" when the service is marketed as unlimited.
If we don’t use “abuse” then the word becomes less useful and we have to find a new one to cover this scenario. This is the same usage of “abuse” as appears in the expression “abuse of process”.
On the contrary, if we reserve the word "abuse" for situations where the ToS is actually violated then the word becomes more useful.
Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.
Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.
The word abuse also covers scenarios where someone technically or legally has the capability or entitlement to do something, but a convention exists that they will not. This is the usage when someone is said to have “abused their privileges”, or to have engaged in “abuse of process”.
It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.
Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.
Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.
I left a reply to another comment on this topic. To recap that here though, advertising is a non-technical medium generally not bound to literal correctness, especially when the claim is understood by any reasonable person to be an approximation, given that taken literally the claim is obviously impossible.
I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.
The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.
If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.
Bringing up false advertising demonstrates a clear misconception that I think is central to your misunderstanding. A claim of false advertising is predicated on the foundation that a reasonable person could have been mislead. But no reasonable person could be mislead into thinking that Google was offering actually unlimited storage, since it is clear to any reasonable person that such a thing is impossible. “Unlimited” is a perfectly acceptable shorthand for “unlimited as far as nearly all users can tell, interested users are welcome to read the full text of the legal contract agreement for more information”.
Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.
No, because again, adults generally don’t have to clarify this sort of thing in their communications. False advertising laws are predicated on the idea that a reasonable person could misunderstand the advertised claim. It would be a burden on society if all communication was required to be as exact as legal or technical communication. If a person wants the legal or technical details they can read the relevant controlling legal documents, which a company must provide before selling a product that has such documents. And which, in this case, made clear that the plan was not “unlimited”.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you offer something that you never intended to deliver is that not false advertising? It really doesn't matter how you go about denying the delivery. It doesn't matter that any given termination is legally in the clear. All that matters (IMO) is that you offered something when you knew up front that you were never going to deliver it.
And yes, the above would mean that marketing almost any service as "unlimited" would be false advertising. I do actually think that practice should be actively disallowed by regulators. I really don't think that having slick marketing terms is more important that having offerings that are truthfully and accurately advertised. A functional marketplace absolutely depends on the ability of participants to readily understand the services being offered.
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.
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.
Given all the talk about how scalable some of these services are, they end up being pretty easy to break. I'm not on data hoarders, but I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago. All it took was having 3TB of data, mostly a bunch of family pictures, some home movies, a half dozen cloned git repos with a crapton of small .c files in them and having an account for >5 years. My client got wedged in some kind of server reindex operation (or whatever was happening on the server side in the datacenter) that took longer than the 24 hour window to complete. After they told me to reduce my retention window because I had to many "objects" it mysteriously fixed itself a week or two later after basically being offline for a couple months.
Similarly some software I wrote a couple years ago, that wrote a bunch of small files into a single S3 bucket caused a lot of grief at a 3rd party S3 like service because they never imagined someone would write a couple TB of data into a single bucket (actually it used multiple buckets but each one was a TB or two of <1k files).
> I personally "broke" my crashplan account a year or two ago.
CrashPlan lost some of my data some time in 2012/13, blaming it on how they work with Windows's Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
I should have stopped my subscription there and then, but I continued subscribing for another 2 years, probably because I was anxious about needing something else that was in the file retention history.
It wasn't a very good service anyway — slow to upload, often stopping mysteriously, and requiring 1GB of RAM for every 1TB backed up.
I effectively disabled their deduper early on. That solved a large part of the slow uploads, and as a bonus it also reduced the memory footprint. The latter of which is still a problem, but checking my machine at the moment. I see its consuming 10G of address space, but only about 600M are actually resident. I think the 10G number is something I tossed into the config at one point too.
That means I've probably got a bit of duplication @ crashplan, but given the bulk of the data is a .jpg/mpeg dump from my cameras I don't care about the 5-10% of the archive which isn't compressed and likely has some duplication (the .git repos).
OTOH, crashplan isn't my only backup plan, so if they explode tomorrow I don't think it will cause me any grief outside of having to find another offsite/cloud backup solution.
(also as a further note, looking at my config log, it seems I need /proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_watches bumped pretty hard just to keep it running).
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.
>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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
If you have unlimited access to said disk space for a nominal fee, that’s commons.
Similarly, if you rent a hotel room, you have free access to common areas like the pool or lounge. Normally this works wonderfully, until a big party takes over the common space.
