It's possible that they banned someone by pure incompetence. I've definitely had my fair share of companies provide terrible service by probably just following some automated system as they are told. However, it is also very unlikely that there is a grand conspiracy on their part to ban people to simply maximize profits.

They do provide a pretty lengthy legal contract and terms to developers, which are partially outlined in this article. I think they just realize that the ball is in their court, and if the company wants to sue them then that is when they present the evidence.

I agree that it would be helpful for people that legitimately don't know and may have made some minor mistake to get more information to correct it, and prefer businesses be transparent when implementing their policies, but from a purely legal perspective it makes sense why Google doesn't do this.

> optimized for profits at the expense of the rest of the world

This is literally what each and every company does - P&G could sell me the toothpaste cheaper, but guess what, they want my money. Very rarely a business deal - money exchanging hands - is "fair" to everybody involved. What would you expect, somebody stop trying everything to make money because of the "greater good"?

Ironically you are giving Google to much credit. There is no real way to improve enforcement. At this insane scale, and with the extreme level of sophistication from scammers, and the privacy expectation from users it‘s almost impossible to do more than they are. Someone else said it further up. They can‘t just let employees snoop around in personably identifying data. Nor would you want that, right?

The fact is, as bad as Google is sometimes about user privacy and „borg behavior“. Their adversaries (malvertising, spammers, clickfarms, bot-armies, state actors) are so committed to manipulating humans for money and/or influence, that they must be hindered wherever possible. It‘s the war for attention. And it‘s only going to get more intense.

The problem here is the assumption that scaling up is inherently good and okay, and not being able to enforce good behavior at a certain scale is just an unfortunate and unavoidable result.

If enforcement can't be managed at that scale, things of that scale should be shut down. Platforms are not an inherent good.

I don’t know. Take YouTube. For all its faults, it has enabled countless people to make a living, or helped artists get noticed. I personally feel having the option for everyone to publish content without prohibitive cost or other barriers is a massive achievement.

Sure you could go back to selfhosting. But monetization and, more importantly, discovery will not work that way.

Or we go back to the days of yesteryear with vetted and sanitized gatekeepers (also beholden to advertisers) in place.

So yeah. Until there is a empathetic, nuanced AGI/ASI in charge of policing content there’s not gonna be a good solution. That might take longer than a while.

If good and ordinary users are going to be collateral damage then that war is already lost.