Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems.
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
> A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
> A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation.
The former is blunt force. It's relatively easy to target and make effective. It just needs enough ground-level support to get enough people from both parties on board - and we're seeing some shifts that way in the current Republican mishmash of groups.
The latter needs excellent technical knowledge and resistance to super-sophisticated lobbying and loophole-creation. It's very hard to get right.
> There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation
We live in a much different world today than during the trust busting era. Extreme concentration is the status quo of today's economy and it's happening across basically every sector and industry.
Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything. Even Trump and an army of partisan DAs that were frothing at the mouth to dismantle Trump's enemies have failed to do so.
Just yesterday Google prevailed against the threat of a breakup of their ad businesses which is perhaps the single most compelling example of anticompetitive abuse by big tech besides maybe the Apple ecosystem.
This trend is only going to accelerate as skilled workers age out of the economy and white collar economic activity aggregates into a handful of massive tech companies.
That's all without factoring in that government quid pro quo is now defacto legal and these companies have very deep pockets for donations.
There are many other factors I could mention but the point is that nobody with any power wants to break up these companies.
> Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything.
Only because she was blocked by both Republicans and Democrats who are sold out to the same plutocrats. I agree with the parent that the problem remains very simple and is a matter of balance of powers. Any fine-grained regulation will be simply ignored by those people who are above all laws.
EDIT: Maybe i was a little too lenient to her. I mean, if a politician really wanted to change the status quo, they'd appeal to the public to help change the balance of power, which Lina Khan never did.
Is it? Are tech companies so popular that voters would revolt if politicians proposed break-ups? They would not be the first - Standard Oil and Bell were also powerful corporations that got split.
What the voters want is of minimal importance. There are near zero politicians that want to break up big tech, and absolutely zero that would be able to actually achieve a break up if they tried. You can see my reply to a sibling comment where I outline why this is the case.
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit.
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.
Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.
But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.
If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it." Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
> I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it."
Strawman fallacy: It is in the interests of private enterprise to not have their $100-million+ airplanes crash, because it means $100-million+ going up in smoke. The owners of those planes would therefore have an interest in not having them crash.
> Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
Under this scenario, if the public finds out that a drug is harmful/lethal, the public jerks away from that drug towards solutions that have a reputation of working.
Is the resulting rate of fatality/worse-QOL lower than (a central authority filtering out drugs & holding them to standards)? No, definitely not. But the gap between the two is not infinite, and in most cases falls into an order of magnitude of difference.
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> I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
An axiom of (feeble-mindedness in the average person) is proposed here. People are as good/competent as the standards that they are held to.
> medical licensing
There's a difference between a certification of competency, and a deliberate constriction of the supply of medical residencies.
If anything, I think software needs more of these sort of top down safety rules. I want to companies held financially / criminally responsible for data leaks. Just like restaurants are held responsible for food safety.
That is ridiculous. These big tech companies are supposed to be broken up under the current rules.
Effective government is not big government, it is right sized.
Rich people and fascists don't want a smaller government, they want a government too weak to protect you from them.
I agree with you. They are in violation of a reasonable interpretation of anti-trust laws already on the books. It's quite clear. And yet those laws are not enforced.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.
Cultural understanding without regulation is just serfdom. That's basically what we have now where most people aren't willing to fight Apple/Google/Meta/MS.
It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than we can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.
The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.
The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.
> I don't believe government regulation is the answer
While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?
I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the de jure government!
So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.
The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.
What you're saying is super reasonable and the ways I think about it too sometimes. I have two thoughts on this and I'm not sure how clear I can be.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
(Sorry for the delay in replying. There is definitely an analog of Gresham's law for discussions)
I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).
I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.
On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!
Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos (which tend to act as de facto government), creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then one of the main things you'd expect to manifest itself is a call for centralized/government action, ala privacy regulation, right? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.
I appreciate the sorts of ways you're thinking about this. I don't think I see it much. It feels like you're looking at things similar to me but arriving at different conclusions. That's super interesting. So here's my belated reply in return.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
The thing about values are that they are very resistant to centralized control by nature.
IP is super decentralised. Digital communications could have led to a more decentralised society than ever before, and in the beginning , they end. But in the end, they didn't, because large actors figured out how to exploit them.
De/centralization is not an either or, but more like a yin and yang. There are aspects of IP that are highly centralized.
1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)
2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.
Banks can't just ban you, nor just take your money. The price they pay for being gatekeepers is a ton of regulation.
This is why PayPal for the longest time made it really clear that "we are not a bank". So that they wouldn't be subject to those regulations and could suspend accounts and keep the money.
I think in this context the concern isn't that you'll lose the money, but your loss of all legal/practical authentication mechanisms.
In other words, you leave the bank-branch with a big sack of cash... And then your car is impounded because you can't prove you're the owner or your license expires, and you'll live in a tent in the woods because landlords can't verify your credit/rental history, etc.
Banks can just ban you if they whisper the magic words "suspected money laundering". They are theoretically accountable to a process that takes 500 years and 3 quadrillion dollars to reach a resolution, then they will unban you. You might notice both you and the bank will be dead by that time.
I actually know someone this happened to. While they did ban him from using the bank, they first warned him, gave him a chance to close out his open transactions, and then helped him move all the money somewhere else at no cost.
The important part is that they can't just close your account and keep everything.
Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity. If a Big Tech company chooses to ban you, they should be required to provide you, at their cost, a copy of all of your data stored with them and report that they did so to a regulator.
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
The same states and countries they integrate with today for digital identity verification. If you have a passport, national ID card, or US state ID or driver's license, you have a government provided digital identity that can bound to and authenticated against. I'm probably missing a government credential in scope, but the backend database lookup is trivial.
The US Login.gov idp is about to roll out identity attestation using your state issued government credential provisioned in your mobile wallet (mDL), for example. I can perform identity proofing and attestation with my digital driver's license and passport in my iPhone Wallet today (at a TSA or CBP checkpoint, for example). Why can I not login to Google and Apple with that identity? It is federated identity management fundementally.
Putting IDs in mobile wallets is such a minefield without explicit bans on phone searches by law enforcement. Law Enforcement being able to rifle through all your email/bank/medical records because you had a traffic stop is just not acceptable.
Why does google and apple need a government login? This makes no sense. You do not want private billionaire companies coming anywhere near a government login. If they get to use it, they will lobby to make it less secure to support more datamining.
It's actually why I will never use any of Google's paid services like compute or LLMs or storage. I will not risk my access to important services. "Free" Gmail and search is all I will use.
And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted.
I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.
It is a very clear act of total betrayal for europan governments to use taxpayers money from Europeans, to invest into US mega-corporations that proxy-enslave Europeans. Lobbyists in Europe are getting rich right now.
Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus.
Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
Ah, yes, AfD. Where you can walk into a meeting, and cut off a guy's speech about five minutes in with this line [0]
Seriously though, I'm surprised that there's not a lot more mass resistance to the idea. It's a massive surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US.
Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US.
For better or worse, there's a sizeable chunk of the US population who still have that "rebel" trait; that and the innate distrust of government and institutions in general is nothing compared to European culture.
Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
Which is funny because the government can't legally ban you from the government. If you suffer any consequences from this, the government is at fault in every case. Of course, good luck proving it while you're in jail.
Banning the entire account rather than AI access is wildly user hostile. People have years of emails and calendars on their accounts.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
My mom’s Gmail account got banned for no reason whatsoever last week. Since then they removed her recovery number and 2FA as they ‘looked suspicious’.
Access to nearly 20 years of emails, photos and docs gone in an instant.
It’s been particularly painful because she used Google to log in to everything too, including for health records that she needs.
There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it and apparently nothing that can be done anyway. It’s absolutely devastating. They’re still charging her for Google One and she can’t even manage the subscription because she can’t log in.
I urge anyone reading this to do a Google Takeout request and make a local backup of all the data they hold.
If not directly through what is offered there, under the DSA (eu citizens and residents) have further ways to appeal their decision, and also Google takeout should be a last option even for banned accounts.
If you have any luck post a followup on HN to guide other users having a similar issue.
Nah, we all pay for a lawyer with our taxes: the attorney general.
What you do is send Google your own correspondence, certified mail, giving them a heads up that you've contacted the attorney general. That usually gets an even quicker response than from a personal lawyer :)
It also gives the attorney general office a heads up if they need to be scrutinizing a company like Google more carefully if they're getting a lot of complaints.
Situations like this are exactly what they're here for.
I have an auto "checkout" every month and I download my data. I don't know if it's readable, I haven't checked, but it feels comforting. My email is also just a private name@domain that forwards to my Gmail. If I ever need to switch, it would be a simple update with my registrar.
(I'm aware domains can be stolen too, but I expect to have some leverage as I'm paying for that in the UK.)
My youtube student account was blocked this week. Google offers a student discount if you register with your school email, so I created a new youtube account for that.
Flagged as a potential bot, gotta tread really carefully or they'll nuke my "normal" google account too.
Big companies are all becoming user hostile these days. They act like the customer is an inconvenience rather than a fundamental part of their business. Every interaction exudes this feeling that your primary role is to serve as an unwanted impediment to money flowing out of your bank account and into theirs.
This feels like the sort of thing that needs to be legislated. Banning accounts after breaking ToS is a pretty common behavior across many companies. The fact a Google account ends up being used for multiple products makes it more interesting but the overall problem here is not unique to them.
Yes, this is why I avoid using my Google account for anything really. Risks from banning are not proportional. It's better to always use separate email logins, and when possible, non-Google services.
No one has actually had their account banned for this, Google just disables their Antigravity access due to breaking TOS. People just repeat the line that “Google bans accounts” because it’s a bigger headline draw.
Apart from the products not being very competitive this is the main reason I'm reluctant to use any Google models / AI products. The account is way to precious thing to lose based on some AI classifier misfiring and then you know there's good route to get it reenabled.
Same. The more of Google's services I touch, the more chance that some errant auto-moderation system will lock me out of Gmail and their support won't do anything about it. Better to not risk it, I don't even log in to YouTube.
Google made some noise awhile back about banning youtube accounts for using adblockers. I'm not sure if they went through with it but it just isn't worth the risk if you have a more important service the relies on google.
Sounds like a good reason to start eliminating your dependence on Gmail. You don't want to tie something as important as your E-mail identity to an account that you might get banned from.
Couldn't one just make a separate Google account for the models/AI products? I usually have multiple accounts with most providers, multiple banks, multiple brokerages, etc.. It really is not that difficult to manage.
Yes as a teenager I made many mistakes, not least of them being making a Gmail account. I even used it to sign up for a few services. I do have a bit of a wild side so sometimes I log in to check it.
The larger issue here is the fact that access to an account can hold you hostage and impact your life in essential services.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
But.. Internet mail is not a lossy system. Quite the opposite!
Unless providers do insane things (e.g. accept then discard), it is much safer than snail mail, where messages may not arrive and not cause the sender to be notified of non-delivery either. With email, the sender gets explicit per-recipient-and-message feedback on what the recipient provider has accepted responsibility (to not lose them) for.
They absolutely do accept then discard when it's flagged as spam above a certain confidence threshold (below that it "only" ends up in the spam folder).
That would be one way to do it but the problem isn't confined to email. Losing an online identity means losing, in practical terms, access to a wide range of government services and regulatorily required filings.
Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.
If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.
There is no world in which it makes sense to take this risk. There are plenty of great alternatives where you don't have to worry about playing russian roulette with your entire online identity.
I'd rather go the other way and entirely decouple my online identity from Google (or Apple/Meta/Microsoft). Much better than constantly worrying about some crappy AI deciding to ruin your life with no recourse.
Google can and will block any linked accounts as well. For some reason I'm not allowed on AdWords. I have tried making new accounts and they always block my ads. I don't know how they figure it out that it's me. Other people on the same wifi have no issues running same ads (for same YouTube videos).
This is exactly why I haven't used any of Google's AI stuff. Unlike other providers, I'm risking my email and internet service (GFiber!) to some capricious ban-happy whim you probably can't even appeal.
> (from Twitter) ...My Google account too valuable to risk it impacted by Antigravity usage
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
I don't self host anymore, as it really is a pain, but use Fastmail instead (while my wife uses Protonmail). I would never rely on Google for, well, anything if I can help it.
I have been self hosting E-mail for close to 15 years now, and apart from the occasional and very rare delivery problem, it's not really a pain at all. Get a dedicated IP address not on a spam blacklist, don't spam, and it's pretty much set and forget. Well worth it to not have your very identity hanging off an account that you might one day be banned for for reasons you can't figure out.
I’m also doing YouTube and the first thing I did was create a separate Google account for it. I’d be very surprised if Theo has everything running on the same personal account
That reminds me the story about closing family wide Google accounts, because of a kid, whose account was managed by Google Family Link, was sending naked selfies to Gemini
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
There was that father who sent some naked pictures of his kid to a nurse for a consultation. Google flagged the account for CSAM and reported him to the authorities. Even after being cleared of all charges, Google refused to reinstate his account, so he lost his digital life.
Tried to use modern technology for the health of his son and was digitally executed for it.
I'm aware. Like I said, you're foolish to trust google. That said, the claim in the reddit post: that the ban spread across the entire gsuite account and also any account that used that device, is far more aggressive.
I talked about that case with a friend who used to work at Google and, whether or not that specific case was true, he did confirm that any CSAM at all in an account can very often make account recovery completely impossible.
I don't get these model providers forcing people to use their (bad) software. I just downgraded my anthropic account because I can't stand the bugfest that is Claude. I won't even touch google for AI. Doesn't matter if your model is good if I have to use your software.
With open-weight models getting closer and closer to parity with frontier models for specific tasks (coding,etc) the frontier labs are trying to make moats via their software.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
"programming is solved" has also been said, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face, let alone going on a podcast tour with it as the mantra
Speaking from experience here, they don't ban your entire Google account, they block access to Antigravity (and only that, other Google AI services are still available). Pi very briefly supported logging into Antigravity a few months ago, I did so and made a couple of toy queries and then didn't use it again, and my Antigravity access was suspended until a few weeks ago.
The process to get un-suspended was completely byzantine and Google's own support desk wasn't able to do anything. I just kept trying newer versions of Antigravity until it eventually grew the ability to explain what was going on and then let me request access back.
i was using antigravity pretty heavily for a while in the spring, it seemed to be a good value for my usage. then i got banned out of the blue for "suspected" ToS violations, with a notification that heavily hinted it was because of openclaw.
i've never used openclaw, never tried to use my google ai subscription anywhere other than the antigravity app. but apparently just "our ai mistakenly suspects you might be using openclaw" is enough to get your google account temporarily suspended. not worth the risk for me, i need a google account more than i need antigravity.
and the ban would be bad enough, but the communication was nonexistent. just a sign-in error on the antigravity app, then a day later it updated to show a vauge warning about openclaw with a link to a random google form to submit an appeal, and then a couple days later my account magically started working again.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
You can wrap claude code in a harness without -p, it works fine. I think most of the concern was that -p resubmits the entire chat history on each prompt which is really bad for kv caching, and when Anthropic announced that they were ok with 3rd party harnesses that DO use -p I think they had figured out the routing and caching for thinking token hash ids
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
Is Antigravity CLI still the only TUI allowed for Gemini? Coming from Claude Code, agy is quite a few steps back. Particularly I miss /ide that can connect to vscode and then can display a pre-write diff which then can be acknowledged or declined in CC.
This is why I'm hesitant to buy Google AI again. I don't want to risk some npm install compromising my Google account which also happens to do AI coding.
I don't understand why google are being like this. This is an opportunity to extend an olive branch to developers (like openai has) and a great way to get data around how people are actually making this model work for them regarding coding…
I was a huge Gemini fan, and I think the model itself is still very good. But Antigravity is absolutely horrible. It routinely writes broken code and then ends up in a short term cycle of reverting and re-implementing.
It's so bad that I don't use it for writing code and certainly wouldn't even bother trying to get it to refactor anything. It's been relegated it to analysis and planning. It is excellent there.
I can't be the only one who find this a little inexplicable that a company with Google's resources is fumbling this so badly.
Gemini is great (and fast) at vision tasks. It's a huge benefit to add on to an existing pi/omp harness install just for that feature to use in conjunction with other (stronger) models.
Too bad this anti 3rd party usage stance basically makes that a huge risk for a lot of people, it was the only thing Gemini has been competitive in outside of API cost.
I think an interesting side of this conversation is how the Google employees are jumping in with DARVO attacks, trying to accuse people of spreading misinformation when they're literally quoting the ToS.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
There have been cases in which friends or family of Google employees have gotten the Google Death Penalty. In those cases they were internally stonewalled about this for weeks. Google's risk department works like secret police[0] and I would not be surprised if there is internal disinformation about what the policies actually are in there too.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
There are official extensions for using Antigravity in IDEs. "Antigravity uses a unified authentication system across all IDE extensions, the Antigravity CLI, and Antigravity 2.0 (Desktop). Your sign-in determines your model entitlements, quota limits, and data privacy policies."
It’s detectable and has been known to result in account bans. People have been doing it since the early days of Gemini, when the ToS was still unclear, and some only found out after their accounts were banned. There have been multiple GitHub issues and reports to Google about it. It’s not worth the effort unless you’re willing to risk a secondary Google account.
And if I am not mistaken, Theo’s T3Code (which was explicitly told was bad), doesn’t even use anything else than AI producer provider command line tools and use them with `-p`.
That line of reasoning has no end. If you use Antigravity on anything other than a Google Chromebook or Pixel, the hardware is a 'product not provided by them'. Is that a TOS violation?
I’ve been an antigravity user since day one. It’s been great when I hit usage limits.
I’ve uninstalled it and will never again use a Google ai product since my Gmail account is simply too important to lose. I don’t care if it’s 10x better and 10x cheaper , these kind of terms are insane!
That's the reason I avoided ever logging into YouTube: if for some reason they decided that my real name is not my real name, due to the Google+ integration, I could lose access to more important things like Google Talk.
Nowadays, with a Google account being all but required to use a non-Apple smartphone, it's even worse.
I'm currently working on a harness and I just integrated Antigravity support through `agy`. I can't risk my main Google account getting banned so it looks like I'll be stopping this immediately. Yikes... and I was feeling good about 3.8 Flash too...
It sounded closer to Scion, which wraps the various harnesses. Given your reply, I'm not sure where your project sits in the stack or what you mean by `agy` support in another harness
I completely understand the concern here, but the person linked is being dramatic and obtuse.
The terms seem to directly relate to your Google Antigravity account. Google has limited GCP suspensions to its cloud service, not your entire account. That is the same spirit of this TOS and what the head of Antigravity has clarified. The terms already make it clear that the context isn't your entire Google account. Misunderstanding the TOS is a silly reason to demand that Google change their TOS.
When confronted with this, the goalpost suddenly moves from "Getting banned from Antigravity bans your entire Google account" to "Getting banned from Antigravity has additional effects"; the only example they can provide is unsubstantiated third-party claims of losing access to Gemini CLI after getting suspended from Antigravity. This is nonsense because these tools are essentially the same thing, with Antigravity being the successor to Gemini CLI. It makes sense that if you get caught violating the TOS for their newer LLM service, you would get banned from all legacy iterations of that LLM service as well. That's hardly getting your entire Google account nuked...
I don't see what the big deal here is. If you want to use Antigravity, you are safe to do so. If you intend for the service to provide tokens to third-party applications, use API billing or face suspension of your Antigravity access for deliberately bypassing their locks and violating the TOS. Why is this unreasonable?
Google has a history of doing account wide bans. If after more than a decade of complaints they have finally figured out service specific bans they need to tell people that.
it's not really over dramatic, considering it's entirely plausible they'd just ban your whole account, it's not like it'd impact even 0.000001% of users, who cares about them
I've built a personal meta-harness on top of agy, cc, codex, kiro-cli, ollama that I use to schedule jobs, run oneshot tasks, etc. which provides a general API for my other personal apps that need to do some inference. For example, I built a personal trip app for an upcoming family vacation that uses the inference API to do things like research locations and plan routes, it basically just calls the various cli harness underneath, so it would look like i'm using them directly with their respective model.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
It's not clear what your full pipe is from your description, but if you're utilizing your Google Pro bundled quota via 3rd party tooling in any way, then you'd be vulnerable to consequences.
I also temporarily had agy as a harness in my orchestrated workflow until I learned about the account bans. IANAL but frontier models examining Google's TOS suggested my use could be in violation. Haven't touched agy for anything since.
If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life.
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
And what do you do when VeriSign just decides that they don't like hosting your domain anymore? You just lost access to password recovery for every account you have https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Google still owns me a few $100 when they banned my watch only youtube red (premium at the time) account for community guideline violations which prevented me from even accessing payment page to stop / cancel. Had to do automated repeals limited every x weeks, couldn't risk charge back or changing credit card incase it fucked with rest of account. Made a separate account to grab my playlists and got banned again for same issue (again watch only accounts) and kept double charging as well. Appeals did nothing... interesting enough both accounts got unbanned like 2 years+ later.. out of blue. I surmise only because I appealed at the time so they made it through some backlog. I have 3rd gmail/youtube account on some generic side project email at the time unbeknownst to be also had youtube banned, literally never used it and only found out it was banned after going to youtube this year trying to post something side project related, and it cannot even be appealed, because it was banned so long ago. Sigh.
For reference, when my wechat account was blocked a few years ago, I got escalated to talking a real person and sorted everything out in a few days.
Can someone link the previous time this kerfuffle happened? That time it seemed like indeed we had misinterpreted, and that at that time they weren't banning accounts just cutting off AI access. But there were a lot of very good very real outraged comments condemning it, even though at the time it was not the policy.
But now! Oh man, the mechanization against humanity proceeding rapidly apace.
Anything can get Google account suspended. Someone in your school was being a shit and registered troll accounts? Google's mighty hammer smites every account that ever logged in from that external IP.
If you're lucky or famous, you can reach HN front page and get your account reinstated. For ordinary rubes, tough luck.
Is anyone really using Antigravity? It seemed rather hyped when it launched but since then I have heard absolutely nothing about it and don’t have a single contact in my Rolodex who uses it.
Out of all the AI-enabled coding environments it seems to have the most downsides.
I think the problem with his ask in that initial picture is mentioning Pi, which doesn't do headless CLI, but does do the OAuth that the TOS specifically mentions.
There's a two week old and 1.5gb (compressed Python archive file) Antigravity ACP server now so things are a tiny bit better. But the agy cli reminds me early Aider. It's literally embarrassing.
Also word of warning: don't buy Google AI subscription before you confirm you have "Antigravity entitlement" whatever that is.
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
The EU Commission is currently rushing ahead with their anti-privacy age verification plans that require Google/Apple account to function. They aren't going to save anyone from this.
I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Commission is trying to get Google to be more proactive at banning accounts and preventing individuals from being able to create new ones. That's what the States were demanding in the recent court case against Meta.
The EU setup an entire EUID system on Google. Hopefully that'll help unlock some accounts since there may be an expectation to continue providing the service.
Just google things. If you buy a monthly package, you pay next day, let's say on the 15th. Then they again pull the monthly amount on the 6th of next month. They pocket your money and the moment you have any issues, well, go F yourself. Everything is automated. They shove your arse out from any service they deem redundant or useless. They zero your data without recourse.
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
No, he is not. It's just that OpenAI has just been doing things a lot better than their competitors lately, and he often highlights the things that make this true.
Just for reference, stuff like this is exactly why some people oppose the forced Apple/Google requirement in government systems like the new eIDs (eIDAS) in Europe. If you're forced to use Apple/Google for digital identification, playing around with your Google account and get it banned can have disproportional consequences. Suddenly you're locked out of all online government systems.
Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them.
Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so that, in theory, no one is above the law. Even imperfect, this cultural belief that governments should behave as such has caused it to be, in a flawed way, more true than it used to be.
These digital gate keepers have special powers that control identity, the algorithms deciding your information awareness, and access to what society now requires to live a normal life. So, what are they? And where is our enlightenment stage? What sorts of human rights are there in this world that we agree on, at least culturally.
I don't believe government regulation is the answer - it has both failed and centralizes again in fewer hands. The thing we need is cultural understanding first of this new sort of entity. And an ethics system that we can agree on that can constrain them as the Magna Carta once described.
How should our collective values shape this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magna_Carta
We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.
A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
> A politically impossible outcome that isn't worth hanging our hopes on.
> A more realistic approach is legislation that either forbids providers from suspending or otherwise limiting access to any government integrated system or simply forbidding these types of integrations altogether.
There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation.
The former is blunt force. It's relatively easy to target and make effective. It just needs enough ground-level support to get enough people from both parties on board - and we're seeing some shifts that way in the current Republican mishmash of groups.
The latter needs excellent technical knowledge and resistance to super-sophisticated lobbying and loophole-creation. It's very hard to get right.
> There's more history in the US of successful legislation aimed at breaking up big companies than at that sort of specific narrow technically-aware well-executed regulation
We live in a much different world today than during the trust busting era. Extreme concentration is the status quo of today's economy and it's happening across basically every sector and industry.
Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything. Even Trump and an army of partisan DAs that were frothing at the mouth to dismantle Trump's enemies have failed to do so.
Just yesterday Google prevailed against the threat of a breakup of their ad businesses which is perhaps the single most compelling example of anticompetitive abuse by big tech besides maybe the Apple ecosystem.
This trend is only going to accelerate as skilled workers age out of the economy and white collar economic activity aggregates into a handful of massive tech companies.
That's all without factoring in that government quid pro quo is now defacto legal and these companies have very deep pockets for donations.
There are many other factors I could mention but the point is that nobody with any power wants to break up these companies.
> Lina Khan as the head of the FTC under the most legislatively prolific Democratic president of the last 30 years was completely powerless to break up anything.
Only because she was blocked by both Republicans and Democrats who are sold out to the same plutocrats. I agree with the parent that the problem remains very simple and is a matter of balance of powers. Any fine-grained regulation will be simply ignored by those people who are above all laws.
EDIT: Maybe i was a little too lenient to her. I mean, if a politician really wanted to change the status quo, they'd appeal to the public to help change the balance of power, which Lina Khan never did.
> politically impossible
Is it? Are tech companies so popular that voters would revolt if politicians proposed break-ups? They would not be the first - Standard Oil and Bell were also powerful corporations that got split.
What the voters want is of minimal importance. There are near zero politicians that want to break up big tech, and absolutely zero that would be able to actually achieve a break up if they tried. You can see my reply to a sibling comment where I outline why this is the case.
Impossible? Why? Think different, think AT&T.
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit.
But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism.
The cultural norms are the prime mover.
> If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests.
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.
Open standards, protocols, and interoperability are definitely part of my values.
But you're still relying on a law if I understand you correctly.
If the society lacks them as deeply ingrained values as opposed to somehow to getting lawmakers to force them, then they will be implemented cynically and not within the spirit of the values. The type of thing that happened with apple's implementation of the anti-gate-keeping laws 'enforced' by the eu.
What you describe requires a flexible values system - not a single semantic standard. I'd love to live in a world where if you were big enough to have people wanting to interoperate with your service on behalf of your users and you were actively preventing it, you'd be an outcast in the deepest sense. That no users would touch your service, and it would be politically unfeasible to deal with you.
We don't live in that world because people have not developed this sort of social norm.
This is one of those problems where there are different ways to solve it but all of them require you to put in the work.
We currently have an army defeatists who show up to tell you that if you think companies would get more customers by selling products that screw them less, nobody cares about that and people just want to live in a convenient cage with an unlimited supply of artificially sweetened penitentiary gruel. These people (to the extent that any can be found who are not robots) should obviously be burned alive in the town square to serve as an example to the others, but the most important thing if you intend to solve the problem in that way is to ignore them and build the product that screws customers less anyway. And then shame the services not doing that into irrelevance, once the alternative actually exists. Put it in your advertising so people know there is a difference.
Likewise, there are better ways to do anti-gatekeeping rules than what the EU is doing. For example, require two things. First, that source code be published as a requirement to receive copyright protection -- not that the customer can make unlimited copies, but that they can read it to know what it's doing or make changes to their own copy. And second, require that if the manufacturer/seller can modify any code running on the device, so can the customer. Now Apple can do malicious compliance all they like, but any vendor locks they put in will have someone distributing a patch to remove them the next day, and inhibiting that is the thing which is prohibited.
> Centralization of power at all levels is bad.
I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it." Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
> I assume that by this you mean something more nuanced than "we should abolish the FAA and let the airplanes crash until private enterprise solves it."
Strawman fallacy: It is in the interests of private enterprise to not have their $100-million+ airplanes crash, because it means $100-million+ going up in smoke. The owners of those planes would therefore have an interest in not having them crash.
> Or maybe "Let drug dealers (pharmaceutical companies) sell whatever the free market will bear without testing, safety, or the ability to hold them responsible."
Under this scenario, if the public finds out that a drug is harmful/lethal, the public jerks away from that drug towards solutions that have a reputation of working.
Is the resulting rate of fatality/worse-QOL lower than (a central authority filtering out drugs & holding them to standards)? No, definitely not. But the gap between the two is not infinite, and in most cases falls into an order of magnitude of difference.
-----
> I only ask, because there are some people who unironically think that we'd be more safe going back to the time before OSHA, or medical licensing, and some of them hang out here.
An axiom of (feeble-mindedness in the average person) is proposed here. People are as good/competent as the standards that they are held to.
> medical licensing
There's a difference between a certification of competency, and a deliberate constriction of the supply of medical residencies.
https://thehill.com/opinion/healthcare/5550556-residency-cap...
If anything, I think software needs more of these sort of top down safety rules. I want to companies held financially / criminally responsible for data leaks. Just like restaurants are held responsible for food safety.
We the people
How?
Idk we will figure it out
That is ridiculous. These big tech companies are supposed to be broken up under the current rules. Effective government is not big government, it is right sized.
Rich people and fascists don't want a smaller government, they want a government too weak to protect you from them.
I agree with you. They are in violation of a reasonable interpretation of anti-trust laws already on the books. It's quite clear. And yet those laws are not enforced.
You seem to be saying that there are a group of people who want it this way and they have more power so that is why is it the case.
But how did we get here? It's a complicated question for sure. And for anything that occurred like this, there are many answers depending on where you put the weights.
I put the weights cultural norms of the maybe 100s of thousands of people that had a hand in how we got here in varying degrees. The leaders of the companies of course who didn't get flack in their communities for doing something that was negative to the rest of society. The politicians who played along, the employees who were proud to work at such a place and the family that could be proud of them for it, even us users who sacrificed liberty for safety and convenience.
At every level, it's social norms that caused this to be.
We are, primarily, social creatures. Even the rich - maybe especially the rich - are greatly influenced in how they act by what those they respect think of it.
You can thank Citizens United for that.
Cultural understanding without regulation is just serfdom. That's basically what we have now where most people aren't willing to fight Apple/Google/Meta/MS.
I can see why it can feel like that.
It's still about framing, though. It's not a fight. The gatekeepers, like governments, laws, and money are social constructs - shared fictions. They are not physical things but made agreements by society. We can't fight them anymore than we can fight ourselves. And they stop working the moment we stop believing in them.
The only way to fight a social construct is to create a new shared fiction that is more desirable and works better.
The machine created by the current social fiction is composed of people who would all be better off with a better narrative. We just don't have the imagination right now to see it. But it is there waiting for us somewhere. Like all the best ideas that transformed us for the better throughout history.
> I don't believe government regulation is the answer
While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by something, right?
I too would love to see the power of surveillance companies get magically reduced by something that isn't centralized government action. But that hasn't happened so far, right? If anything, they've grown stronger - sucked in ever more of our lives, sucked in technical communities who were culturally predisposed to and capable of resisting, and even taken over control of parts of the de jure government!
So barring that, government regulation (ie democratic accountability) seems like a necessary approach. This fails too of course (eg how all the natural rights referenced in the Bill of Rights are being infringed in one way or another). But once again what is the alternative to attempting to codify lofty ideals, writing them down, and then pushing to implement them wherever they're being infringed? Regulation like the GDPR and other EU directives at least attempt to draft rights-based paradigms, as imperfect as their implementation and enforcement may be.
The real problem would seem to be that we're soured on the idea of having reasonable laws in the US from every attempt at meaningful regulation ending up with a multitude of holes in it due to corporate lobbying. It seems like that is what needs to be focused on and addressed - thinking one can let the corpos run wild and then somehow outrun or individualistically push back on them is a pipe dream.
What you're saying is super reasonable and the ways I think about it too sometimes. I have two thoughts on this and I'm not sure how clear I can be.
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
(Sorry for the delay in replying. There is definitely an analog of Gresham's law for discussions)
I completely agree about the feedback loops. They're mutual feedback loops though, and causality can go both ways. We're currently stuck with a strong attractor of surveillance-based software. It's certainly possible to escape from the local minimum, but requires a lot of activation energy to escape it (compelling functionality, features, ease of use, etc, to prime its own network effects).
I don't think it was ads per se, but rather the centralizing software architecture of AJAX (et al). Everyone wanted to build things that were "easy" for "everyone" to use, how to make money came later. Or going back even earlier, if "the web" had been designed around something like content centric networking rather than HTTP.
On "tech moment right now is ripe for it" - for me, it has felt this way for the past twenty five years! I generally agree about pessimism as well, so let's just say at this point I'm tired. I certainly don't want to dissuade you from pouring new energy into software that is going to change the world [for the better]. But I'm also cautioning you to not reject other angles of reform!
Further on the pessimism point, isn't shying away from government (ie collective) action itself a form of pessimism? I'm pretty pessimistic about groups (herds) of people in general (things always end up going "sideways" due to opportunists). But looking at the structure of US politics it seems there is a large contingent of "government can never work" that ends up running interference whenever de jure government tries to reign in the corpos (which tend to act as de facto government), creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Or putting my general point another way, in terms of the culture point you made elsewhere - our mass culture is currently strongly steeped in centralized political action/narratives. If you want our mass culture to change to value technical decentralization and privacy, then one of the main things you'd expect to manifest itself is a call for centralized/government action, ala privacy regulation, right? We can certainly lament the centralized political culture, but unless you're talking about changing two aspects of our culture simultaneously, then that basically is what it is.
I appreciate the sorts of ways you're thinking about this. I don't think I see it much. It feels like you're looking at things similar to me but arriving at different conclusions. That's super interesting. So here's my belated reply in return.
I don't think shying away from governing hierarchies are pessimistic but maybe you see it that way because I didn't explain myself well.
It's important to separate something. Hierarchy and cooperation are not the same thing. Though I guess in instantiation at the human level, they seem to mostly be.
But multi-cellular creatures are made up of cooperating cells wherein there is no centralized power. It seems like nature has borne out that this configuration is robust.
And, if you squint, markets are a similar thing. I love markets. They're a way that people can make individual choices about what they can offer their neighbor and so be rewarded by their neighbor in this positive sum way. It is, by nature, decentralized (though regulation exists in modern markets and sometimes work well for a time as a patchwork kludge over a janky system).
Anyway, there's trust networks there and lots of interesting stuff we could tangent about. But the point is that markets are a decentralized thing have been around longer than governments. We don't need monopolies on violence to cooperate if social norms forbid violence. Of course, the violent ones hacked the system and so we needed to defend against that, so we picked the violent winner, and governance is born.
This is also an interesting path turning point that, given our current technology and understanding, if we started from zero, you could wonder if we could develop in a way without a single entity with a monopoly on violence because we handle this sort of threat somehow else.
There's that whole debt and reciprocity thing that is even older than markets - hell, animals do it. But I wonder about the scalability of that. I don't believe david graeber's idea that the abstraction of reciprocity was the root of all evil but that's like one take and maybe we could make better reciprocity networks.
This is all rambly. I hope my point comes across though. We lack imagination for configurations that can be that are cooperative without the cancer of centralization.
It would be nice if someone starts imagining this for us. It's very hard to imagine a world so different from our own. But we know, by nature, that it is possible. There are a lot of cells in my body - it's not a scale issue.
My take is that cultural values/social norms are the real thing that makes society. We think it's all these things like laws, money, and borders. But those things are secondary fiction memes to the primary fiction meme of values.
The thing about values are that they are very resistant to centralized control by nature.
IP is super decentralised. Digital communications could have led to a more decentralised society than ever before, and in the beginning , they end. But in the end, they didn't, because large actors figured out how to exploit them.
De/centralization is not an either or, but more like a yin and yang. There are aspects of IP that are highly centralized.
1. Assignment of addresses is centralized. Even though it's federated (ie distributed), authority still flows logically from one single authoritative view. And even though individual networks can choose to go against that central view, diverging too much prevents them from talking to one another (ie most of the bargaining is on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, rather than something more nimble or adaptive)
2. It's a protocol for communication between nodes. Reusing node addresses as service/contents addresses leads to services being inherently centralized on those (logical) nodes. Not a problem with IP itself, but definitely an attractive nuisance that made problems for things naively layered on top of IP like HTTP(S) and DNS.
They are not governments but have properties of them.
Additionally, they are unelected.
At that point, Google and Apple should be legally barred from fully banning you if it impedes you identifying yourself unless your account is hacked.
Gov. logins and services should never depend on companies like Google.
our govt farms the authorization out to banks (multiple of them), seems to work well. There is also a govt auth on top of that if you don't want that.
Banks can't just ban you, nor just take your money. The price they pay for being gatekeepers is a ton of regulation.
This is why PayPal for the longest time made it really clear that "we are not a bank". So that they wouldn't be subject to those regulations and could suspend accounts and keep the money.
> Banks can't just ban you
They kinda can.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/seeing-like-a-bank/
Sure, but they have to give you your money back. They can't just keep the money.
I think in this context the concern isn't that you'll lose the money, but your loss of all legal/practical authentication mechanisms.
In other words, you leave the bank-branch with a big sack of cash... And then your car is impounded because you can't prove you're the owner or your license expires, and you'll live in a tent in the woods because landlords can't verify your credit/rental history, etc.
Banks can just ban you if they whisper the magic words "suspected money laundering". They are theoretically accountable to a process that takes 500 years and 3 quadrillion dollars to reach a resolution, then they will unban you. You might notice both you and the bank will be dead by that time.
I actually know someone this happened to. While they did ban him from using the bank, they first warned him, gave him a chance to close out his open transactions, and then helped him move all the money somewhere else at no cost.
The important part is that they can't just close your account and keep everything.
Depends on where. Here, basically all banks require MFA - where the only supported second factor is their app on an iPhone or non-rooted Android.
Meaning the requirement is just Apple or Google account with extra steps.
This is the solution. Implementing auth isn't that difficult.
Oh yeah, auth itself isn't that difficult. But... auth resilient against malicious actors?
Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems. This prevents them from revoking access, as the identity management is within nation state control vs big tech. You potentially have recourse with your government, you have no recourse with Google and Apple (current state). They may consume your identity for your benefit, but they may not control your digital identity. If a Big Tech company chooses to ban you, they should be required to provide you, at their cost, a copy of all of your data stored with them and report that they did so to a regulator.
I strongly doubt the US would mandate this, but could see the EU doing so. The technical primitives exist and implementation is straightforward. Without a law, this will not change, there is no incentive for it to change.
The way the EU could implement this is to mandate only using identity providers can guarantee they will not revoke people's identities, and the only way to make that guarantee watertight is to mandate only identity providers based within the EU.
There are no guarantees unfortunately, just contracts (formal and informal) that can be broken and paths as to what happens when those contracts degrade or fail. Agree with you on mandating EU only idps for those who reside within the EU jurisdiction.
> Google and Apple should be legally mandated to federate with nation state identity systems.
With which states?
I'm I'm a citizen of two and live in the third, potentially having eSIM of the fourth?
The same states and countries they integrate with today for digital identity verification. If you have a passport, national ID card, or US state ID or driver's license, you have a government provided digital identity that can bound to and authenticated against. I'm probably missing a government credential in scope, but the backend database lookup is trivial.
The US Login.gov idp is about to roll out identity attestation using your state issued government credential provisioned in your mobile wallet (mDL), for example. I can perform identity proofing and attestation with my digital driver's license and passport in my iPhone Wallet today (at a TSA or CBP checkpoint, for example). Why can I not login to Google and Apple with that identity? It is federated identity management fundementally.
https://zendesk.login.gov/hc/en-us/articles/51945946704148-m...
https://learn.wallet.apple/id
https://wallet.google/intl/en_us/digitalid/
Putting IDs in mobile wallets is such a minefield without explicit bans on phone searches by law enforcement. Law Enforcement being able to rifle through all your email/bank/medical records because you had a traffic stop is just not acceptable.
The ID can be presented without providing the device to law enforcement. Same UX as a payment, it’s an NFC exchange.
Why does google and apple need a government login? This makes no sense. You do not want private billionaire companies coming anywhere near a government login. If they get to use it, they will lobby to make it less secure to support more datamining.
It's actually why I will never use any of Google's paid services like compute or LLMs or storage. I will not risk my access to important services. "Free" Gmail and search is all I will use.
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And there's the problem that they can do this with no recourse and no defense permitted.
I'm reminded of the guy who lost his Google access over "child pornography"--a picture sent to his little boy's pediatrician that got automatically uploaded. The police agreed he had done nothing wrong, Google didn't give him his account back.
It is a very clear act of total betrayal for europan governments to use taxpayers money from Europeans, to invest into US mega-corporations that proxy-enslave Europeans. Lobbyists in Europe are getting rich right now.
Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus.
Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
What do you mean, you don't think a party named the "Alternative for Deutschland" would make benevolent use of such systems when it gets into power?
Ah, yes, AfD. Where you can walk into a meeting, and cut off a guy's speech about five minutes in with this line [0]
Seriously though, I'm surprised that there's not a lot more mass resistance to the idea. It's a massive surveillance apparatus. Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3AegXcu7kA
Meanwhile, Flock cameras are getting cut down, shot at, spray painted, or stolen with regularity in the US.
For better or worse, there's a sizeable chunk of the US population who still have that "rebel" trait; that and the innate distrust of government and institutions in general is nothing compared to European culture.
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We already live in fascism - governments and corporations are just wings of the same bird.
In that case you should be able to create another Google account.
Politicians have been pushing companies to be more aggressive about banning individuals who open new accounts after their previous one gets banned. That was even one of the requirements of the deal in the recent social media court case in the US.
What's your evidence politicians are relevant to this?
Which is funny because the government can't legally ban you from the government. If you suffer any consequences from this, the government is at fault in every case. Of course, good luck proving it while you're in jail.
Banning the entire account rather than AI access is wildly user hostile. People have years of emails and calendars on their accounts.
And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
My mom’s Gmail account got banned for no reason whatsoever last week. Since then they removed her recovery number and 2FA as they ‘looked suspicious’.
Access to nearly 20 years of emails, photos and docs gone in an instant.
It’s been particularly painful because she used Google to log in to everything too, including for health records that she needs.
There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it and apparently nothing that can be done anyway. It’s absolutely devastating. They’re still charging her for Google One and she can’t even manage the subscription because she can’t log in.
I urge anyone reading this to do a Google Takeout request and make a local backup of all the data they hold.
I hope this page can provide some guidance in the appeal process https://transparency.google/intl/en-GB_in/tools-programs/rep...
If not directly through what is offered there, under the DSA (eu citizens and residents) have further ways to appeal their decision, and also Google takeout should be a last option even for banned accounts.
If you have any luck post a followup on HN to guide other users having a similar issue.
Or you can not waste your time and hire an attorney to send them a polite letter saying "put the account back or get sued."
I had a look at the link and became hopeful when I clicked on “Appeal a disabled account”, but then the page loaded and said this -
“”” Ask us to restore your account
If you own the account, you can request access to it again.
- Sign in to your Google Account on a browser, like Chrome. - Select Start Appeal. - Follow the instructions. “””
C’mon Google, if I could do step 1 then I wouldn’t be on this page.
I will absolutely post a guide if we can figure out a way out of this mess.
Appreciate you trying to help. I’ll do a bit more digging on that page and see if I can find anything.
You might want to try to follow on that, maybe they do have a separate if in their codebase if you're logging in for the appeal.
Otherwise the DSA approach, with whatever that may entail process wise.
“… There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it …”
Of course there is: you pay your lawyer to send correspondence by registered mail.
Then you have them send followup correspondence a week or so later.
You will absolutely get a response.
Everyone everywhere has the money and time to keep a lawyer on retainer. This is super equitable and a reasonable way to run society
Everyone Google cares about, anyway.
Nah, we all pay for a lawyer with our taxes: the attorney general.
What you do is send Google your own correspondence, certified mail, giving them a heads up that you've contacted the attorney general. That usually gets an even quicker response than from a personal lawyer :)
It also gives the attorney general office a heads up if they need to be scrutinizing a company like Google more carefully if they're getting a lot of complaints.
Situations like this are exactly what they're here for.
https://www.naag.org/find-my-ag/
people "have" lawyers? how much would this cost on a yearly basis?
I have an auto "checkout" every month and I download my data. I don't know if it's readable, I haven't checked, but it feels comforting. My email is also just a private name@domain that forwards to my Gmail. If I ever need to switch, it would be a simple update with my registrar.
(I'm aware domains can be stolen too, but I expect to have some leverage as I'm paying for that in the UK.)
> I don't know if it's readable, I haven't checked, but it feels comforting.
I've been meaning to get back to tinkering with a Immich on a docker container, as a Google Photos competitor I can self-host.
My youtube student account was blocked this week. Google offers a student discount if you register with your school email, so I created a new youtube account for that.
Flagged as a potential bot, gotta tread really carefully or they'll nuke my "normal" google account too.
Big companies are all becoming user hostile these days. They act like the customer is an inconvenience rather than a fundamental part of their business. Every interaction exudes this feeling that your primary role is to serve as an unwanted impediment to money flowing out of your bank account and into theirs.
And we are not in The Crash yet! Imagine how will they behave when they become desperate!
I haven't touched Google's AI suite due to this. I need to migrate my email away from Google - the stakes are too high.
Luckily I use a custom domain so accounts won't need to be updated, just emails exported and DNS changed.
This feels like the sort of thing that needs to be legislated. Banning accounts after breaking ToS is a pretty common behavior across many companies. The fact a Google account ends up being used for multiple products makes it more interesting but the overall problem here is not unique to them.
Yes, in general, scale needs to come with more responsibilities, including a requirement to provide due process, not less like it currently does.
Good argument for breaking up the company.
Yes, this is why I avoid using my Google account for anything really. Risks from banning are not proportional. It's better to always use separate email logins, and when possible, non-Google services.
No one has actually had their account banned for this, Google just disables their Antigravity access due to breaking TOS. People just repeat the line that “Google bans accounts” because it’s a bigger headline draw.
That's what happens when you let one company do too much and don't break its monopoly in time.
Apart from the products not being very competitive this is the main reason I'm reluctant to use any Google models / AI products. The account is way to precious thing to lose based on some AI classifier misfiring and then you know there's good route to get it reenabled.
Same. The more of Google's services I touch, the more chance that some errant auto-moderation system will lock me out of Gmail and their support won't do anything about it. Better to not risk it, I don't even log in to YouTube.
Google made some noise awhile back about banning youtube accounts for using adblockers. I'm not sure if they went through with it but it just isn't worth the risk if you have a more important service the relies on google.
Sounds like a good reason to start eliminating your dependence on Gmail. You don't want to tie something as important as your E-mail identity to an account that you might get banned from.
Couldn't one just make a separate Google account for the models/AI products? I usually have multiple accounts with most providers, multiple banks, multiple brokerages, etc.. It really is not that difficult to manage.
Though, I only have one HN account, fwiw.
That's what I do. Both for this reason, and because I don't want to log into my personal gmail on work devices.
I don't necessarily feel safe, though, and have moved my important stuff off of gmail.
If your Google account is precious, you've already done something wrong...
Yes as a teenager I made many mistakes, not least of them being making a Gmail account. I even used it to sign up for a few services. I do have a bit of a wild side so sometimes I log in to check it.
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The larger issue here is the fact that access to an account can hold you hostage and impact your life in essential services.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
The government haven't noticed that email became as important as regular mail, unfortunately.
It's noticed... selectively.
Ours sends revenue service notifications exclusively via email, a lossy system... and legally assumes you got it.
But.. Internet mail is not a lossy system. Quite the opposite!
Unless providers do insane things (e.g. accept then discard), it is much safer than snail mail, where messages may not arrive and not cause the sender to be notified of non-delivery either. With email, the sender gets explicit per-recipient-and-message feedback on what the recipient provider has accepted responsibility (to not lose them) for.
They absolutely do accept then discard when it's flagged as spam above a certain confidence threshold (below that it "only" ends up in the spam folder).
Perhaps they haven't seen https://jmail.world
The government has a monopoly on regular mail though (at least in the US). Should email be treated as a utility?
That would be one way to do it but the problem isn't confined to email. Losing an online identity means losing, in practical terms, access to a wide range of government services and regulatorily required filings.
Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.
If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.
Something like that. I think DNS registry system works pretty well under ICANN supervision: user isn't tied to a specific registrar.
> The wording is confusing but the account in question is the Antigravity account. We will change the ToS wording here to make that clearer.
- Varun Mohan on the antigravity team
https://x.com/_mohansolo/status/2095529407033000260
There is no world in which it makes sense to take this risk. There are plenty of great alternatives where you don't have to worry about playing russian roulette with your entire online identity.
I'd rather go the other way and entirely decouple my online identity from Google (or Apple/Meta/Microsoft). Much better than constantly worrying about some crappy AI deciding to ruin your life with no recourse.
> with your entire online identity
Seems like one account for idendity (gmail and personal gemini assistant) and another for everything else would be a best practice.
Google can and will block any linked accounts as well. For some reason I'm not allowed on AdWords. I have tried making new accounts and they always block my ads. I don't know how they figure it out that it's me. Other people on the same wifi have no issues running same ads (for same YouTube videos).
Did you use Chrome?
I just cancelled my AI Ultra subscription, despite what he claims the risk is too high and I’ll never put my trust in a Google ban reconsideration.
Zero trust in Google making that distinction correctly. Antigravity is DOA for me.
Because the wording is the problem not the way how they suspect third party use
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This is exactly why I haven't used any of Google's AI stuff. Unlike other providers, I'm risking my email and internet service (GFiber!) to some capricious ban-happy whim you probably can't even appeal.
>whim you probably can't even appeal.
not to beat a dead horse in this thread , but that should give the motivation needed to seek alternatives.
> (from Twitter) ...My Google account too valuable to risk it impacted by Antigravity usage
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
I don't self host anymore, as it really is a pain, but use Fastmail instead (while my wife uses Protonmail). I would never rely on Google for, well, anything if I can help it.
I have been self hosting E-mail for close to 15 years now, and apart from the occasional and very rare delivery problem, it's not really a pain at all. Get a dedicated IP address not on a spam blacklist, don't spam, and it's pretty much set and forget. Well worth it to not have your very identity hanging off an account that you might one day be banned for for reasons you can't figure out.
If you're, say, Theo, you can selfhost email all you want, but it still ties down your YouTube channel, AdSense, etc., with little to no recourse.
I’m also doing YouTube and the first thing I did was create a separate Google account for it. I’d be very surprised if Theo has everything running on the same personal account
I used to use Gmail since beta, then moved out last year because of this kind of "situation".
typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you
These days, those two might be the same thing.
That reminds me the story about closing family wide Google accounts, because of a kid, whose account was managed by Google Family Link, was sending naked selfies to Gemini
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
fwiw, google said that didn't happen.
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
There was that father who sent some naked pictures of his kid to a nurse for a consultation. Google flagged the account for CSAM and reported him to the authorities. Even after being cleared of all charges, Google refused to reinstate his account, so he lost his digital life.
Tried to use modern technology for the health of his son and was digitally executed for it.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
I'm aware. Like I said, you're foolish to trust google. That said, the claim in the reddit post: that the ban spread across the entire gsuite account and also any account that used that device, is far more aggressive.
I talked about that case with a friend who used to work at Google and, whether or not that specific case was true, he did confirm that any CSAM at all in an account can very often make account recovery completely impossible.
I don't get these model providers forcing people to use their (bad) software. I just downgraded my anthropic account because I can't stand the bugfest that is Claude. I won't even touch google for AI. Doesn't matter if your model is good if I have to use your software.
With open-weight models getting closer and closer to parity with frontier models for specific tasks (coding,etc) the frontier labs are trying to make moats via their software.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
Kind of ironic for these companies to make their moat software while at the same time saying that SaaS and software development in general is obsolete
"programming is solved" has also been said, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face, let alone going on a podcast tour with it as the mantra
Does Claude not allow third party harnesses?
Ad injection or prepping for ad injection.
You may also be banned by asking "sensitive" or "inappropriate" questions. So normal usage of Google AI products could also be risky.
I don't care if my Claude or OpenAI account is banned, but risking a Google account is different.
Does that apply to the search AI too?
I don't know but I'm basing my assumptions on this article: Teenager’s Gemini mistake locks entire family out of Google accounts [1].
1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
Speaking from experience here, they don't ban your entire Google account, they block access to Antigravity (and only that, other Google AI services are still available). Pi very briefly supported logging into Antigravity a few months ago, I did so and made a couple of toy queries and then didn't use it again, and my Antigravity access was suspended until a few weeks ago.
The process to get un-suspended was completely byzantine and Google's own support desk wasn't able to do anything. I just kept trying newer versions of Antigravity until it eventually grew the ability to explain what was going on and then let me request access back.
i was using antigravity pretty heavily for a while in the spring, it seemed to be a good value for my usage. then i got banned out of the blue for "suspected" ToS violations, with a notification that heavily hinted it was because of openclaw.
i've never used openclaw, never tried to use my google ai subscription anywhere other than the antigravity app. but apparently just "our ai mistakenly suspects you might be using openclaw" is enough to get your google account temporarily suspended. not worth the risk for me, i need a google account more than i need antigravity.
and the ban would be bad enough, but the communication was nonexistent. just a sign-in error on the antigravity app, then a day later it updated to show a vauge warning about openclaw with a link to a random google form to submit an appeal, and then a couple days later my account magically started working again.
My friend got a ban by using Pi agent with Antigravity.
They un-banned him later, but that was enough to stay away. There are much better services than Antigravity out there.
I can be fairly confident that when Google says they don’t see your data, they don’t.
I am also fairly confident that nobody sees the moderation decisions either.
Well, I’m glad I’m not using my google account for much any more.
Is OpenAI the only one that allows this? Because Codex without codex is fantastic.
> Because Codex without codex is fantastic.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
I believe you can use an OpenCode Go sub with any tool, was stated as such last time I looked at their docs.
per token pay-go is typically unrestricted aiui
You can wrap claude code in a harness without -p, it works fine. I think most of the concern was that -p resubmits the entire chat history on each prompt which is really bad for kv caching, and when Anthropic announced that they were ok with 3rd party harnesses that DO use -p I think they had figured out the routing and caching for thinking token hash ids
Good that I saw this.
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
Yeah they had gemini extensions, they depreciated them and forked vscode, now they are crawling back to vscode with antigravity extensions...
Is Antigravity CLI still the only TUI allowed for Gemini? Coming from Claude Code, agy is quite a few steps back. Particularly I miss /ide that can connect to vscode and then can display a pre-write diff which then can be acknowledged or declined in CC.
This is why I'm hesitant to buy Google AI again. I don't want to risk some npm install compromising my Google account which also happens to do AI coding.
And this, dear Watson, is why we never use Google services for anything serious.
And we tell our children the same.
I don't understand why google are being like this. This is an opportunity to extend an olive branch to developers (like openai has) and a great way to get data around how people are actually making this model work for them regarding coding…
This would have been a massive issue if Antigravity/Gemini were any good.
I don't appreciate but kinda understand that Anthropic can act arrogant with Fable. Google (shockingly) is really in no position for this.
100% this.
I was a huge Gemini fan, and I think the model itself is still very good. But Antigravity is absolutely horrible. It routinely writes broken code and then ends up in a short term cycle of reverting and re-implementing.
It's so bad that I don't use it for writing code and certainly wouldn't even bother trying to get it to refactor anything. It's been relegated it to analysis and planning. It is excellent there.
I can't be the only one who find this a little inexplicable that a company with Google's resources is fumbling this so badly.
or that the company that invented transformers is fumbling this so badly
many of their best people left during the SaaS boom cycle in the 20'oughts, current leadership is abysmal
there is also that well known promotion incentive misalignment at big g
Gemini is great (and fast) at vision tasks. It's a huge benefit to add on to an existing pi/omp harness install just for that feature to use in conjunction with other (stronger) models.
Too bad this anti 3rd party usage stance basically makes that a huge risk for a lot of people, it was the only thing Gemini has been competitive in outside of API cost.
I think an interesting side of this conversation is how the Google employees are jumping in with DARVO attacks, trying to accuse people of spreading misinformation when they're literally quoting the ToS.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
Googlers expect the consumers of their products to be Googlers who can just read up on the internal info or ping someone etc
they don't understand the concept of external users being a thing
that's the impression I've gotten
There have been cases in which friends or family of Google employees have gotten the Google Death Penalty. In those cases they were internally stonewalled about this for weeks. Google's risk department works like secret police[0] and I would not be surprised if there is internal disinformation about what the policies actually are in there too.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
There are official extensions for using Antigravity in IDEs. "Antigravity uses a unified authentication system across all IDE extensions, the Antigravity CLI, and Antigravity 2.0 (Desktop). Your sign-in determines your model entitlements, quota limits, and data privacy policies."
https://antigravity.google/docs/ide/extensions/
Liberate yourself from Google - the de-Google movement is gaining more momentum every day.
Best alternatives to Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets today?
Anybody running LibreOffice online or NextCloud as a service.
What is preventing anyone from automating on top of the normal google Antigravity CLI?
It’s detectable and has been known to result in account bans. People have been doing it since the early days of Gemini, when the ToS was still unclear, and some only found out after their accounts were banned. There have been multiple GitHub issues and reports to Google about it. It’s not worth the effort unless you’re willing to risk a secondary Google account.
Google explicitly allows this and documents how: https://antigravity.google/docs/cli/headless/
This is so weird, because using a script to invoke the agy cli is clearly using a "third party tool to access the service" !
Wouldn’t that violate the quoted ToS? I guess it would.
"Using the service in connection with products not provided by us." The Agy CLI is provided by them.
And if I am not mistaken, Theo’s T3Code (which was explicitly told was bad), doesn’t even use anything else than AI producer provider command line tools and use them with `-p`.
So? There's still a connection to products not provided by them.
Remember that this is a TOS, so you gotta presume that they will act as malicious as possible within the text.
That line of reasoning has no end. If you use Antigravity on anything other than a Google Chromebook or Pixel, the hardware is a 'product not provided by them'. Is that a TOS violation?
Yes. I'd avoid using services like this.
I think that is what paseo is doing and I don't risk trying it.
It's never too late to degoogle.
Buy a domain. Get fastmail, proton mail or any other service. Point your DNS to it. Done.
I’ve been an antigravity user since day one. It’s been great when I hit usage limits.
I’ve uninstalled it and will never again use a Google ai product since my Gmail account is simply too important to lose. I don’t care if it’s 10x better and 10x cheaper , these kind of terms are insane!
That's the reason I avoided ever logging into YouTube: if for some reason they decided that my real name is not my real name, due to the Google+ integration, I could lose access to more important things like Google Talk.
Nowadays, with a Google account being all but required to use a non-Apple smartphone, it's even worse.
I'm currently working on a harness and I just integrated Antigravity support through `agy`. I can't risk my main Google account getting banned so it looks like I'll be stopping this immediately. Yikes... and I was feeling good about 3.8 Flash too...
OpenCode is a good harness that works with every token vendor
Err... the harness I'm building works just fine with Google APIs.
It sounded closer to Scion, which wraps the various harnesses. Given your reply, I'm not sure where your project sits in the stack or what you mean by `agy` support in another harness
I completely understand the concern here, but the person linked is being dramatic and obtuse.
The terms seem to directly relate to your Google Antigravity account. Google has limited GCP suspensions to its cloud service, not your entire account. That is the same spirit of this TOS and what the head of Antigravity has clarified. The terms already make it clear that the context isn't your entire Google account. Misunderstanding the TOS is a silly reason to demand that Google change their TOS.
When confronted with this, the goalpost suddenly moves from "Getting banned from Antigravity bans your entire Google account" to "Getting banned from Antigravity has additional effects"; the only example they can provide is unsubstantiated third-party claims of losing access to Gemini CLI after getting suspended from Antigravity. This is nonsense because these tools are essentially the same thing, with Antigravity being the successor to Gemini CLI. It makes sense that if you get caught violating the TOS for their newer LLM service, you would get banned from all legacy iterations of that LLM service as well. That's hardly getting your entire Google account nuked...
I don't see what the big deal here is. If you want to use Antigravity, you are safe to do so. If you intend for the service to provide tokens to third-party applications, use API billing or face suspension of your Antigravity access for deliberately bypassing their locks and violating the TOS. Why is this unreasonable?
Google has a history of doing account wide bans. If after more than a decade of complaints they have finally figured out service specific bans they need to tell people that.
it's not really over dramatic, considering it's entirely plausible they'd just ban your whole account, it's not like it'd impact even 0.000001% of users, who cares about them
I've built a personal meta-harness on top of agy, cc, codex, kiro-cli, ollama that I use to schedule jobs, run oneshot tasks, etc. which provides a general API for my other personal apps that need to do some inference. For example, I built a personal trip app for an upcoming family vacation that uses the inference API to do things like research locations and plan routes, it basically just calls the various cli harness underneath, so it would look like i'm using them directly with their respective model.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
It's not clear what your full pipe is from your description, but if you're utilizing your Google Pro bundled quota via 3rd party tooling in any way, then you'd be vulnerable to consequences.
I also temporarily had agy as a harness in my orchestrated workflow until I learned about the account bans. IANAL but frontier models examining Google's TOS suggested my use could be in violation. Haven't touched agy for anything since.
Agy has the print option so I don't see how using it is against TOS, but still I'd do that on a burner account.
If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life.
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
Alternatively, impose regulatory requirements to keep the 99% who aren't you safe from big tech companies making decisions for their own convenience.
And what do you do when VeriSign just decides that they don't like hosting your domain anymore? You just lost access to password recovery for every account you have https://neil.fraser.name/news/2026/09/03/
Google still owns me a few $100 when they banned my watch only youtube red (premium at the time) account for community guideline violations which prevented me from even accessing payment page to stop / cancel. Had to do automated repeals limited every x weeks, couldn't risk charge back or changing credit card incase it fucked with rest of account. Made a separate account to grab my playlists and got banned again for same issue (again watch only accounts) and kept double charging as well. Appeals did nothing... interesting enough both accounts got unbanned like 2 years+ later.. out of blue. I surmise only because I appealed at the time so they made it through some backlog. I have 3rd gmail/youtube account on some generic side project email at the time unbeknownst to be also had youtube banned, literally never used it and only found out it was banned after going to youtube this year trying to post something side project related, and it cannot even be appealed, because it was banned so long ago. Sigh.
For reference, when my wechat account was blocked a few years ago, I got escalated to talking a real person and sorted everything out in a few days.
What is third party? If I self-host OpenClaw, is that third party?
If I write my own harness, is that third party?
Insane policy
Why bother creating a CLI and OAuth interface if your ToS punishes for using it
It comes down to whether the OAuth token generated by their client is used only in their client.
If you register a new OAuth client and generate access tokens for it to call the API, then you are following the rules.
Can someone link the previous time this kerfuffle happened? That time it seemed like indeed we had misinterpreted, and that at that time they weren't banning accounts just cutting off AI access. But there were a lot of very good very real outraged comments condemning it, even though at the time it was not the policy.
But now! Oh man, the mechanization against humanity proceeding rapidly apace.
Anything can get Google account suspended. Someone in your school was being a shit and registered troll accounts? Google's mighty hammer smites every account that ever logged in from that external IP.
If you're lucky or famous, you can reach HN front page and get your account reinstated. For ordinary rubes, tough luck.
Is anyone really using Antigravity? It seemed rather hyped when it launched but since then I have heard absolutely nothing about it and don’t have a single contact in my Rolodex who uses it.
Out of all the AI-enabled coding environments it seems to have the most downsides.
I've had Codex use antigravity for subagents with 'agy -p'. Is that considered 3rd party usage?
No, because you called the service from their client.
Yes, that's exactly what T3Code does. https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/2095453990980817301
I think the problem with his ask in that initial picture is mentioning Pi, which doesn't do headless CLI, but does do the OAuth that the TOS specifically mentions.
It doesn't seem like T3 Code ever implemented antigravity at the time of the post. Now they've added it via ACP: https://github.com/pingdotgg/t3code/pull/9348
I'm happy to learn otherwise, but that thread doesn't seem to explain anything.
There's a two week old and 1.5gb (compressed Python archive file) Antigravity ACP server now so things are a tiny bit better. But the agy cli reminds me early Aider. It's literally embarrassing.
Can someone point to a mirror of this X link ? It wants me to install the app to read something that I could/should be able to read using my browser.
They've all been taken down or blocked to my knowledge. The Nitter folks got a C&D legal letter. This was a few days ago, maybe a week ago.
Update: https://codeberg.org/mv12star/shitter/wiki/Instances
If you have not already, use Google Takeout to download a copy of your data. Especially email, contacts, timeline, google drive, and photos.
Google has been becoming more like Apple in both positive and negative ways. Not a fan of this era.
Also word of warning: don't buy Google AI subscription before you confirm you have "Antigravity entitlement" whatever that is.
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
And their verification is some major AI slop that just doesn't work. This is open from June but this was already a bug in Gemini CLI before then: https://github.com/google-antigravity/antigravity-cli/issues...
Do they ban the offending account by itself or all of your accounts?
This shouldn't be allowed. EU regulatory avengers...assemble
The EU Commission is currently rushing ahead with their anti-privacy age verification plans that require Google/Apple account to function. They aren't going to save anyone from this.
I also wouldn't be surprised to learn that the Commission is trying to get Google to be more proactive at banning accounts and preventing individuals from being able to create new ones. That's what the States were demanding in the recent court case against Meta.
The EU setup an entire EUID system on Google. Hopefully that'll help unlock some accounts since there may be an expectation to continue providing the service.
They really want to get themselves out of relevance huh
I cant even login via cli, also Gemini doesnt work.
Anthropic has these exact same terms.
Anthropic does not control the last 15 years of my digital life.
Or the method by which I reset accounts for other services.
Or my phone.
Just google things. If you buy a monthly package, you pay next day, let's say on the 15th. Then they again pull the monthly amount on the 6th of next month. They pocket your money and the moment you have any issues, well, go F yourself. Everything is automated. They shove your arse out from any service they deem redundant or useless. They zero your data without recourse.
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
> Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
What kind of "small joes" are training LLMs???
Smaller :)
Is theo a paid shill for openai?
Because he's certainly coming off as such.
No, he is not. It's just that OpenAI has just been doing things a lot better than their competitors lately, and he often highlights the things that make this true.
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