I don't think you are exposed to the reality of the problem. I'll describe one incident I witnessed for you to get an idea.

We were working on a client's medical information site. A reputable MD. He happened to own about 250 domains parked at GoDaddy. We were going to use AdSense on his one site once it was up. He went ahead and setup an account with Google to use both AdSense and AdWords. During this process he saw that Google offered a product called "AdSense for Domains". The premise being that you park your Domains with Google and they auto-magically place ads on them.

The domains were already parked with GoDaddy's "Cash Parking" service for over a year. It didn't take long for him to realize that this was an intermediates version of Google's AdSense for Domains. He decided to cut out the middle man and park the domains directly with Google.

He transferred all the domains. They had to be approved by Google. That happened overnight. All was well. Two days later he gets the dreaded notice and his entire account is permanently suspended without recourse, without a way to learn what the problem may have been and without a way to speak to a real person. Horrible. Particularly when you realize that he had already been using this service through GoDaddy as a middle-man.

That is the kind of thing a shit company who cares not for their customers would do, not a company who clims to live by this "Do no evil" ethos.

Based on that experience I can't see ever trusting them with anything at all. Great search. Absolute lack of respect and consideration for their customers, which is an absolutely shitty way to behave in my book.

My standing recommendation is to not use Google for anything other than search.

If the person was buying Adwords ads and then using them to direct customers to parked domains, then I think I have an inkling as to why their account was terminated, considering I am the person who implemented that policy.

No such thing. The events were exactly as I described them. No ad clicking. No vectoring through AdWords. Nothing other than a transfer of the domains from GoDaddy intermediated parking to Google's "AdSense for Domains" and in three days the account was closed.

Because there's zero feedback all we could figure out is that some of the domain names (he had a couple that were politically charged) may have hit a filter. What's weird is that they went through their approval process, started showing ads for a day and then the account was closed.

This is one account. Search for "Google closed my account" to read more horror stories, all with different threads. Their process and approach is absolute crap. Not to be trusted with anything.

If they weren't buying Adwords ads, then they weren't paying Google anything, and thus, it's absurd of you to demand that someone providing you with a free service would also guarantee customer service.

I'm sorry, are you trying to be funny?

Of course these people were using AdWords for their business. They were NOT using it to vector people to the parked domains.

Only a moron would do that. Spend dollars to make sub-pennies?

Good to know that the MFA problem I spent 2 years of my life fighting is now seen as trivial.

I don't understand what you are saying. Not a clue.

> I didn't work on the Policy team - I was a dev - but I seriously doubt anyone there could terminate peoples' accounts without reasonable suspicion of a violation and get away with it. The checks and balances are too tight.

As a consultant I had two clients who had their accounts disabled for no reason, and who I am absolutely positive were not breaking and rules. I've seen google steal the balance from adsense customers, without offering any recourse or even a human to talk to. Whatever those checks and balances are, they are no where near enough.

How exactly can you be "absolutely positive" they weren't breaking any rules?

Who is right here?

The customers who have received no feedback as to what they apparently did wrong, and were abruptly cut-off? They are "absolutely positive" they are in the right, as they have no idea which rules, if any, they broke, and have no chance to fix the issues.

Or Google, who provided a business service and then took it away with no explanation or ability to rectify? They may believe the customer broke some rules, but have not provided any meaningful customer interaction mechanism to allow for errors. There will always be errors with populations this large.

Three ideas: 1: Charge people/businesses for making a complaint about termination. If the termination was done in error, then refund them the fee (at least). Use the fees to pay for customer service staff.

2: Charge people for account reactivation, regardless of (almost all) causes. Steadily (exponentially) increase the fee, but allow for 1: as well.

3: Be extraordinarily explicit when telling customers why their account was terminated/suspended. Stop the guessing game and show the evidence you have. That will both for Google to make sure the evidence is sufficient to be public, and make the customer aware of just what went wrong. Allow them to fix the issue and reapply.

Above all the current aproach is placing the customer's concerns last, not first. That needs to change before we will trust Google with our important business or personal data.

As an enterprise level (20k accounts) Apps customer, I'm thrilled with their customer service and only disappointed with the lack of engineering responsiveness. Moreover, at a certain scale, it's certainly possible to redline the boilerplate agreement and negotiate the contract i.

Your experience is one of privilege. You have not been exposed to the issues I am talking about. Search for "Google closed my account" and read a few thousand posts to learn more.

If you get burned like a witch there is a reasonable suspicion that you actually are a witch. That's pretty circular.

More like "if you get burned like a witch, there's a reasonable suspicion the people doing the burning thought you were a witch".