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Comment by mitxela | Hacker News Reader

Small claims court is designed to minimize costs

Yes and winning from Google in small claims court is definitely possible: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-i-sued-google-and-won_b_1...

Edit:

AI can be a great help here, ask it:

- How to prepare your case for your country.

- Where to file and how much it going to cost.

- Help you find weaknesses in your case and what you can do to fix those.

- Rewrite your text in proper legalese (I do recommend to prepare the your arguments yourself to avoid over generalization from an LLM).

Of course you need to verify because of hallucinations but showing up is half the battle here. Big (tech) corps + internal bureaucracy makes it quite expensive for fight these cases. Especially if there are many different countries.

You might get your 100 dollars but google will ban you / stop doing any business with you the minute you start that so you better be sure you don't need your account or google services going forward.

Then you sue them again in small claims court for the damages of not having access to your accounts (to which other online services require/are tied to which are not Google-owned properties) and have the judge force your reinstatement with a warning to Google that such punitive actions taken maliciously against the user will result in a prior fine*exponential multiplicative levied for each occurrence, with the base fine amount being the prior multiplicative fine issued.

That leaves Google with very few chances to fuck up before they're financially wiped out, and this is a ruling you can have issued in a small claims court.

How would you force the judge to do that? Has this strategy ever worked for anyone you can cite? Have you tried it yourself?

Otherwise, I'm not sure why just being able to imagine a knock out David vs. Goliath win against Google has any value whatsoever as a viable legal strategy.

It's certainly valid and it has been done in other situations, but the details are different. I don't know that of any case where it's been tried against Google. It's certainly reasonable to think it could work against Google, but the details of would it actually work in the real world? I have no idea. Even if there was precedent that someone could cite, that doesn't mean that your case would win.

If you really want to know, you need to consult a lawyer, not ask here.

"How would you force the judge to do that?"

You read my wording wrong - you wouldn't force the judge, the judge forces Google.

Was there a follow up if he ever managed to collect on the $721 judgment?

EDIT: Ah, missed the follow up link at the end. No, he did not get any money.

Google appealed to a superior court (sending their lawyers this time) and the award was modified to $0.

So he didn't actually win, the online meme that "small claims are the one weird trick to beat the mega corps" doesn't usually hold up to scrutiny. I doubt throwing ChatGPT into the mix would have helped against their in-house counsel.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-google-bothered-to-ap_b_2...

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