Promises to do something for a year which you can change or withdraw after 30 days are really promises for 30 days:

"Google may make changes to this Agreement, including pricing (and any linked documents) from time to time. Unless otherwise noted by Google, material changes to the Agreement will become effective 30 days after they are posted, except if the changes apply to new functionality in which case they will be effective immediately. If Customer does not agree to the revised Agreement, please stop using the Services." https://cloud.google.com/terms/, Section 1.7b

Also, Sections 13.1-13.3 means even though Google promises nt to do something, you really don't have any recourse if they do it anyway and cause you damage.

Although in the grand scheme of things, not the worst terms of service document I have read. The mere fact the drafters addressed the issue is worth ... something.

Disclaimer: IAMALBIANYL.

> Disclaimer: IAMALBIANYL.

I like that one. :)

I have a question though, is the prevalence of taglines in any way related to legal requirements? Do you have to stipulate that you aren't a lawyer when stating things because otherwise people to construe it as legal advice, or is it just a fun little identifier of how valid we should consider information to be (like it is in other acronyms of the same type)?

I think it may stem from laws and rules related to practicing law, but there is certainly not any "requirement" to stipulate you are not a lawyer when speaking about legal things. However there are a few things to be mindful of: In the (all of the) United States (and many other countries) the profession of lawyer or attorney is regulated and requires a license to practice as such. In many places to practice law without a license is a criminal offense. Obviously this doesn't contemplate criminal charges against a group of people spouting off about something legal related on the Internet (otherwise we would have to jail perhaps 80% of reddit), but providing legal advice and interpreting the legal effect of contracts, statutes, or regulations is part of the practice of law.

The reason we heavily regulate the practice of law is similar to the reason we heavily regulate the practice of medicine. If you screw something up, the consequences can be bad. If someone takes your advice thinking you know what you are doing, and you are wrong, that person can end up a lot poorer or even in prison. (Though some will argue we regulate it so lawyers can be the only ones charging high fees for legal advice!) Just like one probably shouldn't go around telling folks not to worry about their incredible chest pain and shooting arm pain unless they are a trained medical doctor, the same could be said for those that go around offering home spun legal advice.. ("Yeah man, if you ask the undercover cop if he is law enforcement, he HAS to tell you! Otherwise it is entrapment man...")

Also the reason you always see lawyers preface everything by saying "I'm not your lawyer.. This isn't legal advice... Yadda yaddda yadda" is because once there is an Attorney-Client relationship a lot of stuff happens. The lawyer has a host of duties to the client, from confidentiality, to competence, and many others. That obligation isn't taken lightly and many times if there is any doubt whatsoever whether or not there is an attorney-client relationship, the law will find in favor of one because --- well -- the lawyer should know better. Therefore lawyers will make it annoying clear they aren't your lawyer before spouting off some deep legal thoughts about whatever the topic of discussion is.

It may have started as an ass-covering move, but I also think of it as a common courtesy for letting people know that you're offering non-specialist advice and to take it with a grain of salt.

I kind of wish people did that for more things: "I am not theologian/windows user/empathetic person, but..."

Great answer. Has the acronym "IANAL" ever been tested in court in such a way, to your knowledge? Now you have me curious, and that'd honestly be quite amusing.

Ha! Interesting question. I just ran an all state/federal Westlaw search for "IANAL" and didn't hit any case law. Two or three briefs, a couple of scholarly articles, but no court opinions. I also searched for "I am not a lawyer", but that brought up about 130 caselaw hits which seemed to primarily be references to various filings by pro se parties actually saying in a court filing "I am not a lawyer".

That lines up with what I assumed, and the last paragraph is specifically what I was asking about (not the IANAL case so much as the opposite). Thanks!

Is this really how it works? I guess you have to go to court to find out, but I always thought of it this way:

If I have the same policy (support for 1 year) and I change the contract - the change will only take actual effect after 1 year.

I mean, I'm contractually bound today to provide support for 1 year from today, no? Am I just rambling, or does it make sense?

That's pretty eye opening. Curious if you have looked at AWS with a similar regard, are they any better?

Not any better, arguably worse:

https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/

"We may change, discontinue, or deprecate any of the Service Offerings (including the Service Offerings as a whole) or change or remove features or functionality of the Service Offerings from time to time. We will notify you of any material change to or discontinuation of the Service Offerings."

"We may terminate this Agreement for any reason by providing you 30 days advance notice."

"We may modify this Agreement (including any Policies) at any time by posting a revised version on the AWS Site or by otherwise notifying you in accordance with Section 13.7..."

Ha, yikes! Thanks for the highlights. I'm guessing Azure has similar (or any IaaS company) leaving us to basically go on trust of the company to support their offerings long term.

Google seems to be facing a trust problem here that its competitors don't, due to its history of shutting down popular services, even those that were being used internally and even those that it had been recently hyping to the press. Due to this unusual context, perhaps it would help if Google were to increase this promise from 1 year to 10 years (or 5 years or 3 years).

Yep. Their trust problem is also very well earned both from the APIs they've killed/changed and from the long list of Google products in the graveyard.

They've killed APIs/Products, but they've almost always given a very long amount of time to transition.

Also have killed APIs/Products that are extremely difficult to transition from with short notice. For example, they gave ~4 months for the Google Wallet for the web transition, and no data portability for businesses with users on subscriptions.

Stripe, for example, has a data portability clause that allows you to move card data to another payments processor that meets some compliance standards.

https://support.google.com/payments/merchant/answer/6107573?...

Regardless of if you get 4 months notice or 1 year notice you still have to do the work to migrate and you're still stuck with the sunk cost of investing in/learning a doomed platform.

That's why I wouldn't build a business on Google, because they have a long history of killing things when they aren't wildly profitable/successful. A $10m/yr profit product is considered a distraction of valuable engineer time unless it has some ulterior goal for the company.

And I'm not saying they should change -- they do what's right for them. One engineer working on some distraction project could instead be moved to ads quality and end up making a change worth anywhere from hundreds of millions/yr to billions.

But they can't have their cake and eat it.

Google App Engine comes to mind. I'm amazed they would kill of such a product at all.

Google App Engine isn't killed. It's still alive and new features are being added. What are you talking about?

The GP was probably referring to the huge price change that effectively killed it for many people.

On the flipside, API's like maps have had stable versions that are deprecated for years.

That's one of the few examples that hasn't burned developer trust. But it's still not a shining example -- there were times of price changes and rate limit changes.

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. No matter how much power/money you have at disposal.

This is good, but I wish Google offered the same policy for most of their other general cloud services.