I really dislike this explanation because there are so many obvious things they can do. Example:
1. Force uploads of Passport/ID for identity confirmation. If you have 100 accounts with the same passport...ok...issue, but if not, is it worth human review at least?
2. Force credit card payment with address verification, ideally match to passport. Same credit card used across 1000 accounts...ok...issue, but if not, perhaps worth a review at least?
3. Still an issue? Force user to pay $100 for verification and run credit check routine.
The idea that blanket account terminations are the only way to handle issues seem lazy.
Op wants to be able to hire somebody with a history of abuse without google enforcing them
And that's pretending they don't already make obscenely high profits per developer, and can absolutely afford to provide the necessary support for these situations, which again, are largely their mistakes to begin with.
I don't know what universe android app developers are living in, this is basically "free" for most significant businesses.
For that $25, you are NOT going to get white glove support / treatment. Not happening.
That sounds like extortion...
"We're going to ban your account because we want to, unless of course you pay us $5,000 so you can talk to a human to resolve this issue."
If you want to talk to a tech company engineer for bug fixes, you pay for that level of service.
There is something a bit almost scammy about all these "businesses" demanding white glove custom treatment, but complaining loudly about even being asked to pay a one time $25 fee to get on platform.
It used to be to deploy to a platform / get SDKs for the platform the costs were FAR higher.
There are something like 5M+ android developers. If you want to support this developer pool with 2-3 hours of work per developer per year, you are looking at 15M hours of work per year. And these people also become a risk - they can be socially engineered, they can be paid off etc. We've seen this over and over again.
If you look at phone co employees who are supposed to protect you from sim swap attacks etc, they have a large number of employees, so service is "good", but security? Not so much.
What you are proposing is that google should offer a human service in a very adversarial and tricky area (ie, your own staff may be working against you) and that asking to get paid for that is "extortion" that would result in jail time. This is perhaps why they don't even offer a way to pay (a lot) for a very careful high level review. Folks like you would demand jail time for them. Instead we are stuck with automation.
"Bid more than your competitor on AdWords for the literal name of your business or else they'll get the customers who intended to do business with you."
You would think something like this would increase competition between businesses (competitors surfaced immediately for users). Instead I guess this is seen by a bad thing - though it's not been clear to me recently that the FTC is looking out for users, they seem to have gone BIG into protecting businesses for some reason.
Would you rather have a neighbourhood mafioso who is amenable to financial incentives or a local random psychopath?
A lot of folks are offended by $100 / year developer fees. If Apple et al charged $10,000 to get going as a developer, they would probably be better positioned to deal with all this less automatically. In fact, game dev historically might have followed a bit of this model (xbox etc).
Anyways, my own thought, there should be a pathway to a $5,000 fee where you get a higher level of human interaction.