I am utterly baffled as well. This was literally a front-page article in the NYT, not just the online home page but front page of the paper edition [1].

It's one thing to get the attention of some Googlers on the front page of HN, it's a whole other order of magnitude for the front page of the NYT.

I cannot imagine how this hasn't become an urgent priority for Sundar himself to make sure this gets fixed and fast, at a minimum in these known situations. What could they possibly still be debating or deciding inside there at Google...? Police determined no charges, so restore the accounts. I don't see any potential risk, legal/reputational/otherwise, this would open up. Google's inaction here boggles the mind.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2022/08/22/todays-...

I'm surprised at how long this has gone on, but not at all surprised that it happened. Based on my experience at Google, I would have expected the NYT article to get it unstuck within 2-3 days.

When I was at Google, I was continuously amazed at how hard it was to stop this kind of own-goal when we knew it was happening. (Based on where I was inside Google, I came across (dramatically-less-sensational) obviously dumb decisions of this sort).

It was always shockingly hard as a Googler to get traction on fixing some customer's bureaucracy-navigation problem -- but usually it getting into the press finally got someone through the bureaucracy.

My (somewhat cynical) explanation is that they want to deter people from taking these types of medical pictures on their phones, since that makes Google's job easier.

Rather than improve their AI to avoid more of these types of false positives, or invest in their customer support teams to deal with these situations, they can eliminate this entire class of false positives by scaring people with articles like this.

EDIT: which if true, is kind of extra fucked up when you consider the potential consequences of delaying medical treatment for a child.

I’m right there with you in dismay, but I think this has been building up a while: consider how long there have been Google employees who browse HN, fully aware of how broken processes are damaging users and developers, and just sitting on the sidelines because they’re in it for the paycheck.

They are probably worrying that if they did it would open a floodgate of challenges, lawsuits and political attacks.

As the last paragraph of this essay points out: tough. Google needs to step up and deal with the consequences of its own size.

> Google needs to step up and deal with the consequences of its own size.

This is where regulation can help.

This is an under-appreciated factor in regulation ignored by the reflexive "regulation bad" crowd. Companies can welcome regulation, and not in a malign, regulatory capture fashion.

One case could be this one: doing the right thing could open you up to attacks from bad actors. A regulation could give you air cover (and legal cover).

Or lets say you want to be more environmentally friendly but customers won't pay extra. Your competitors do too, but of course you can't agree to do this (that's collusion). A regulation removes the risk and is applied to all.

Google has become too large. As a result, they're a threat rather than a benefit to the web ecosystem.

We saw similar stuff when banks were getting bailed out because they were "too big to fail". That meant that their very size was a threat to the financial system - they were really too big to allow to exist.