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Comment by londons_explore | Hacker News Reader

There is talk of implementing per-service bans. They already exist for adsense and google pay. You can today be banned from adsense but allowed to use all other google services.

Customers seem, if anything, more angry about that though...

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They're angry about that because the "per service" bans are even more capricious. You can get permabanned from something like YouTube for something as fickle as people being unhappy with your videos and mass-flagging them. And of course that's a "per service" ban, but it would turn into a site-wide permaban as soon as Google thought you were trying to evade it and join YT with another account. I won't even get into the whole copyright enforcement stuff which is just as badly implemented, but at least Google has plausible deniability there since the law requires them to ban "repeat" offenders. No, it's everything else that's real crazy and scares a lot of sensible people away.

They would probably be less angry if the adsense bans were not completely random & unjustified.

Most people I speak to about the adsense bans claim their ban was totally unjustified, but then later reveal that they might have clicked on ads on their own webpage "just once or twice to test it"...

There's maybe a small proportion of people falling into this category but since the bans are automated and triggered on obscure rules outside of the account's owner knowledge, I would argue a that a good proportion of bans are just random. The fact that support is close to non-existent just makes it worse for sure.

I had myself an account banned and I can assure you it's really totally random.

Google doesn't ban itself when they violate their own terms of service (Notification spam, mass WiFi network collection, Google Buzz) "just once or twice to test it"

Yes, because they still have a voice left.

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