Same reason that you can't cancel a gym membership by walking up to a person and saying "cancel my membership".
Predation, pure and simple.
Google doesn't care, no one is holding them responsible for predatory behavior. It's profitable to steal from your customers and there's no downside to doing so.
Where do you live that consumer protection is this bad? Of course you can cancel any gym membership at their physical location, as long as you can also sign up at these physical locations.
What idiot lawmaker would allow a system where you can sign up without a computer, phone or fax, but then need these media to cancel what you just signed up for?
Many memberships (like phone and internet service contracts) aren't rolling contracts, they're annual or biennial to lock you in. Of course you can cancel at the term of the contract, but many start strong, let it peter off, and by they time they realise they're paying for a service they're not using, they're well out of a cooling-off period.
It may have changed but there are (or used to be) gym memberships that would only let you cancel if you could prove that you moved and your new primary residence was more than one hour from the nearest branch. (I'm pretty sure there was a law passed to end this practice, but it was widespread)
In the United States this is not true. Bally's gym memberships are examples of this. I had one once and there were only three ways to cancel it. 1. You die, 2. You become disabled in a permanent way that would prevent you from ever using it, or 3. You move far enough away that there is no physical location within 100 miles of you AND they won't be building one within the next year.
This has changed since I had mine as I had the membership around 30 years ago, but they still in general do not allow cancellation at the physical location. You must write to them.
Edit: I just read that they all transitioned to LA Fitness now, and I'm not sure what their policies are but Bally's, while unethical and infamous, were not illegal as far as I know.
Because there's money in letting people make mistakes on their own dime.
For every story about a mistake in the tens of thousands, I wonder how many there are in the single-thousands, hundreds and even tens where people just suck it up and pay the bill. When you provide such a limited billing support surface, employ a thousand lawyers in-house, and hold as many cards as Google does (losing my G account would ruin my year).
Multinational service providers need better regulation to ensure consumers' rights are protected. In the UK utilities and banks have to absorb (or insure) against some leaks, theft and external fraud. If Google (and others!) were subjected to similar regulation, problems like this would evaporate overnight.
They can wave 18k pretty easily because they'll make it up in 18,000 other overcharges of varying amounts that aren't contested. Or that are corporate clients that just eat it.
Things like this are the exact reason that companies end up having to comply with all kinds of regulations. It's just easier to screw the customer first.
Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers. All workloads using that billing account would be impacted immediately.
If they weren't turned off at the billing cap, but were given some leeway instead, either that becomes the new hard limit, or GCP will have to give away the difference.
And there's no "middle ground" you could implement that makes sense either - like a "frozen" state. Preventing new writes to a GCS bucket breaks the writer app. Freezing VMs serving web traffic takes the site down.
Even if the service was shut down once the billing limit is hit, how long would GCP wait for the user to add funds or raise the limit? GCP would need to either keep the services in a hidden/frozen state or not turn them off / freeze them at all (in which case GCP would be giving away resources for free).
Maybe GCP can give users a heads-up when they're about to hit the limit? GCP already does - billing alerts do exist. It's just possible to blow past them if your usage is a massive spike.
Moreover, getting the hundreds of GCP services to implement a "frozen" state is difficult. It's hard enough getting everyone to listen to the "billing account disabled" signal, and (soft-)delete the resources (based on the resource, after some time interval). Given these billing overruns happen for smaller customers, it's not really worth solving the problem - which I don't think has a great solution to begin with.
>Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.
That's why you make it opt in with suitable disclaimers about data loss from deletions (a warning which btw GCP already shows you when you disable billing on an active project).
I'd say the average person is well positioned to determine whether they're a broke student that can't afford a $1000 surprise or a corporation that needs reliability above all.
> Suddenly turning off services when the billing cap is reached is a big reliability risk for customers.
And yet this is exactly what happens if you exceed a quota limit, which aren't always well signposted and sometimes require days to get the limit raised. I've experienced multiple hours-long outages due to hitting GCP quotas we didn't know existed.
Predation, pure and simple.
Google doesn't care, no one is holding them responsible for predatory behavior. It's profitable to steal from your customers and there's no downside to doing so.