Ask HN: Should I or any Google Ads user ever take legal action against Google? Our Google payment profile got flagged by an automated system. We later tried to reinstate it and succeeded. The problem is that the whole process took nearly a whole month, and we lost a meaningful amount of revenue due to this (about 20 days without ads). It's one thing if it's only bad support (and the support was unbelievably bad), but in our case, Google had introduced some technical problems to our account when we were migrating from a normal @gmail.com-account to a business account with a custom domain. If we did everything Google Support, Google Help Sites and all the Suspension-UI-Elements were telling us, then we wouldn't ever get our account back if no one would intervene. In detail: (see comment) This whole nightmare was caused, because: - Googles account transformation process leads to broken access rights - Google allowed us to use a payment profile which we somehow can't access / probably shouldn't be even using according to their TOS, because we can't keep the address up to date, etc., but they still reinstated admin access to the ads profile and let us happily spend money over years - Google didn't invest enough resources in a robust and correct UI regarding support forms / tickets / suspension UI elements / etc. The presented information was false and misleading. Just check out the account recovery form, it's not even clear that it is about unblocking payment profiles, and it's not clear if you unblock all of them or only some - Google support ignored a bunch of our support requests, like "Is it possible to get access to the payment profile of our ads account?" and even the account verification form tickets ended up just disappearing - Google support was basically completely clueless what to do, what's going on, not capable of explaining why it takes so long or what the problem is, and the next steps were always the same, we made 3-4 full circles with over 10 tickets, and they were constantly making false promises The other stuff: - They have a monopoly - We must use them. We are significantly less competitive in our industry if we don't. - Google support admitted to us that they can't prevent the same thing from happening again, because their automated flagging process could kick in anytime This was the most dystopian thing I ever experienced, we heavily rely on Google Ads to be able to pay salaries and rent on time (although this is very soon changing). So we tried to communicate as professional, calm and clear as possible, but it didn't help much. How much sense does it make to take legal action against Google? How will they react? Could they block our accounts immediately? What do you think would happen if our lawyer takes action? |