[george0812]

If your business relies heavily on Google to get customers (Adwords) or for generating revenue (Adsense, youtube, extensions, search, …) You are doomed. Google will/has terminated accounts on a whim with no recourse: one day you wake up and your business is destroyed, all you have is a vague, automated email and no way to contact a human being.

"Oh you spent 4 years working on this extension and have thousands of paying customers? We removed it because, well… we can't tell you! And, no we won't bring it back."

"Oh sorry we have to suspend your Adsense account AND keep all the money because… well, we can't tell you!"

"Oh you composed an original song for your youtube video? we're going to suspend your channel with 3 million subscribers because our system wrongly flagged your song as copyright infringement. And, no, we won't bring your channel back! ever!"

"Oh you use our PAID email service for your company paying us thousands every month? Oops, you're locked out because we falsely flagged you. We might give you access again in 2 months, we'll see… In the meantime use pigeons to send messages"

To Google you are just a number, a statistic. They absolutely don't care about you or your business because they have market power.

This company is the worst partner you can ask for, a true monopoly abusing customers and users alike.

STAY AWAY from Alphabet!

[justinbaker84]

You are correct but staying away from Alphabet is a lot easier said then done. They are still the best way for a small to medium business to reach customers. Ever since the iOS changes that crushed Facebook's targeting capability Google has only become more dominant in the advertising space.

To me it seems like avoiding Alphabet basically means avoiding advertising and it is really hard to grow a business without it.

[whatshisface]

So what do we do, start holding companies for our adsense accounts?

[3np]

I’m kind of surprised we haven’t read about this kind of thing happen to something like a public school or hospital (surely they exist?) relying on Google services.

[dsr_]

Not too far into the pandemic, Google had a US-wide whoopsie that killed Google Classroom for a couple of hours.

Any school (including the one my kids were attending) that depended on Google Classroom was down for the morning. External SPOF.

[rmbyrro]

Isn't it easy to just create another account?

[freedomben]

Yeah, but it won't take the algorithm long to figure out who you are and terminate/ban your new account. And, because you tried to circumvent controls, any personal accounts you have are also now banned forever. TBF I read about this on HN, not my personal experience.