Now they are warning him that they are suspending his account in 7 days. If he continues to do nothing they will then notify him again before cancelling his account and deleting his data.
Google makes plenty of bad choices, but this seems like a problem that Burke made entirely for himself.
That's not clear at all.
> If he continues to do nothing
What is he supposed to to with 277TB of data in 7 days? Google can't even serve him all of his data in that timeframe. He's being treated like his account is doing some undesirable activity that he can just stop doing at a moment's notice, not a technical data migration.
At this point, all he can probably do is start deleting files to avoid account cancellation. If he wanted to move all the data elsewhere, he had over half a year to do that.
How can you possibly think that over half a year of free service isn't enough of an accommodation? In what world does it make sense to assume that having your subscription terminated and you storage put into read only mode means it is OK to just leave it there and do nothing if you want to keep it?
He took full advantage of an amazingly good deal on a unlimited storage plan, then when it was cancelled, continued to assume he could just leave the data there for free. Google could legally just have pulled the plug on him for continuing to abuse a service he wasn't paying for.
The short timeframe now is because the user did nothing in over half a year to resolve the problem.
Google could have more clearly communicated that read-only state was temporary, but assuming it was permanent seems wildly optimistic and naive.