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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

There's two things at stake here:

1. The letter of the service being offered

2. The spirit of the service being offered

Personally, I've always thought #2 was more important than #1. Unfortunately, #1 is often the one that gets enforced, especially when lawyers get involved, which is why legalese exists because when you know people argue from the standpoint of #1, you have to make sure there aren't any loopholes. But I'm digressing a bit here...

Look, just because a company offers something "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean it can't be abused. To argue otherwise is bad faith, IMO. We can argue over where the line is, but that's just a pointless distraction.

But I think everyone would agree that storing a petabyte of data with a service that offers "unlimited" storage for $12/month is abuse.

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Number 2 doesn't really exist. It simply means lying about the service you're offering when you really intend to offer a lesser service. All so you don't have to say "practically unlimited" or "virtually unlimited" in your marketing copy.

I wouldn't agree that that's abuse. I'd say that it's a bad business model, and I'd be wary of a scam, but it's not abuse.

A: "We'll store all your data, no limit!"

B: "Ok, here's all my data."

A: "Abuse!"

Doesn't really make sense to me.

Think of it less of legalese and more in terms of human speech and it becomes a bit more understandable why there some people consider this fine.

"help yourself to the drinks" carts your entire refrigerator and larder's supply home

It's not abuse any more than using your $500/month insurance plan to cover a $12,000/month chemotherapy treatment is abuse. Advertising unlimited storage for $12 is Google saying "We bet the vast majority of our users don't need twelve dollars' worth of storage but will pay it anyway because they want one less thing to have to think about".

On the other hand, your insurance company would have strictly (and wisely, IMHO) defined how many millions worth of chemo your $500/month plan will buy you, or specifically what kinds of treatments will it pay for, and at what rates.

So, if you run into a "miracle doctor" that will charge you $1,000,000 per dose of their "miracle medicine" that "wipes away cancer, like, forever", the reasons why your claim will be denied are already stated clearly in the small print of your contract.

It's not abuse, they can't get the goodwill advertising value from unlimited and then call foul when people take them up on it, that's absurd. If Google doesn't think it can make money with unlimited storage for 12$ then they shouldn't offer it, not offer it then complain about customers using it too much.

Unhelpful perspective, honestly. Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite. This is a distinction that adults don’t have to make except when they are perhaps talking to small children. And besides, it’s not like Google ever promised anyone “unlimited” anything. The contract says “unlimited, unless we decide to change something”. Getting up in arms about the literal wording while ignoring the fact that only the literal wording of the contract matters is also unhelpful.

Google disconnecting unprofitable users is not the issue. They of course have that right, as stipulated in the terms of service. The point of contention is whether it's fair to call abnormally high use "abuse" when the service is marketed as unlimited.

If we don’t use “abuse” then the word becomes less useful and we have to find a new one to cover this scenario. This is the same usage of “abuse” as appears in the expression “abuse of process”.

On the contrary, if we reserve the word "abuse" for situations where the ToS is actually violated then the word becomes more useful.

Similarly, if we reserve the word "unlimited" for things that are actually, y'know, unlimited, then the word again becomes more useful.

Flagrant disregard for commonly understood definitions of words when it's convenient to one's cause is a concrete example of a tragedy of the commons that makes a language less useful overall.

The word abuse also covers scenarios where someone technically or legally has the capability or entitlement to do something, but a convention exists that they will not. This is the usage when someone is said to have “abused their privileges”, or to have engaged in “abuse of process”.

It sounds like you object to the standard usage of these words, which doesn’t seem like a productive position. Olive Garden isn’t actually going to give you unlimited breadsticks either.

Eesh.

Google advertised unlimited. By definition that means without limits. To then put limits is to make the plan limited. Instead of doing thesemental gymnastics to defend Google might I suggest that the people storing petabytes of data are taking advantage of Google's goodwill but not doing anything inherently wrong. That being said Google calling the people who use petabytes abusive is hypocritical, and wrong. Google wants a certain type of user that overpays for "unlimited" and uses a pittance. Instead Google found that they advertised themselves into a pickle and are trying to blame people using the service as advertised.

Google can either advertise unlimited and live with the costs or advertise what they're actually willing to provide. Users using a service within the advertised constraints is not abuse.

I left a reply to another comment on this topic. To recap that here though, advertising is a non-technical medium generally not bound to literal correctness, especially when the claim is understood by any reasonable person to be an approximation, given that taken literally the claim is obviously impossible.

Double eesh.

I'm not talking about literal or pedantic correctness here.

The antonym of unlimited is limited. You're using some impressive mental gymnastics to justify advertising a product with one word while providing the opposite.

If the literal interpretation of whatever hogwash the marketing dept is spewing is obviously impossible then I posit that the companies who do so are deliberately misleading consumers for profit. That seems to me to be an open shut textbook example of false advertising. But then neither my job depends on not understanding this distinction, nor am I overpaid lawyer employed to a company engaging in these patently fraudulent activities.

Bringing up false advertising demonstrates a clear misconception that I think is central to your misunderstanding. A claim of false advertising is predicated on the foundation that a reasonable person could have been mislead. But no reasonable person could be mislead into thinking that Google was offering actually unlimited storage, since it is clear to any reasonable person that such a thing is impossible. “Unlimited” is a perfectly acceptable shorthand for “unlimited as far as nearly all users can tell, interested users are welcome to read the full text of the legal contract agreement for more information”.

Olive Garden, after all, cannot actually provide you with “unlimited breadsticks” either.

> Of course there’s a limit on anything “unlimited”, the world is finite.

So it's false advertising?

No, because again, adults generally don’t have to clarify this sort of thing in their communications. False advertising laws are predicated on the idea that a reasonable person could misunderstand the advertised claim. It would be a burden on society if all communication was required to be as exact as legal or technical communication. If a person wants the legal or technical details they can read the relevant controlling legal documents, which a company must provide before selling a product that has such documents. And which, in this case, made clear that the plan was not “unlimited”.

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