Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil". This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action.
It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.
> This is completely sociopathic and amoral and a human had to have approved the action.
How is it sociopathic and amoral to ban scalpers?
> Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers.
Defenseless doesn't mean innocent, and there's no evidence that these users were falsely accused or otherwise innocent of the violations they committed.
First, by your own definition "scalping" is nothing more than choosing to sell property that you have legally acquired, and there is nothing wrong with that. Second, even granting that in this case reselling the phones violated Google's terms of service, the punishment is disproportionate to the violation. Speeding is illegal, but confiscating the cars of speeders and permanently revoking their licenses would be absurd.
You are incorrect. The people that were punished were people that ordered phones on behalf of someone else and had those phones directly shipped to that someone else.
Buying something with the sole intention of reselling it for profit is the literal definition of scalper.
The words you're looking for are mastermind and pawns. The pawns took the fall (as they usually do), and the mastermind didn't get hit.
So you're arguing that you don't own the phone you purchase outright? Your argument for scalping falls a bit flat: When it comes to (concert) ticket scalping, you don't own the performance, you're purchasing the ability to view the performance at the given time. When it comes to a phone, you're purchasing the phone (not simply the ability to use the phone) and you should be able to do whatever you want as long as its legally allowed.
"ownership" has nothing to do with why scalping is frowned upon / policed. Scalping is a problem because the goal of scalping is to buy something that's limited in supply so that it can be resold at a higher markup. It's purely an issue because supply is limited, it has nothing to do with ownership.
Concerts are always limited in supply, which is why scalping is prevalent there more than most other things. If tickets were infinite in supply nobody would care about concert scalpers, that wouldn't exist.
And the reason this matters to places selling things limited in supply is that scalpers hurt consumer satisfaction and generate negative impressions of the seller due to greedy opportunists that were otherwise outside of their control. Thus why they place limits on how many you can buy until supply is high enough (like in this case how Google had a limit of buying 5 devices - enough for most families, not enough for re-sellers)
I never really understood this distinction... why can't you similarly say that "you should be able to do whatever you want <with your ability to view the performance> as long as it is legally allowed"?
It's the ownership that's important. You can consider scalping a specific form of the generalized issue of doing something outside of an agreement of something you don't own, e.g. subletting a room on Airbnb if a rental agreement forbids it. If you own a phone (or some other object), unless there is a law that specifically forbids some action, at least in the US you are able to do whatever you want with it, because you're not renting the right to use the phone, you are the owner of the phone. That's why in this case, it's not fair that Google turns off service for purchasing a phone and then selling it to someone else (a reseller in this case) because they person who purchased the phone is now the owner and selling their phone to another entity is not against the law. In fact, there are laws that specifically allow this.
Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
If you truly feel that wiping those people's personal communications records and blocking their email is a reasoned response then I sincerely hope you are never in a position of power.
> Innocent? No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
That has no bearing on the issue at hand. Just because entity A is guilty of X doesn't magically make entity B innocent of Y.
If powerful entity A is guilty of X on a massive scale and then punishes weaker entity B for engaging in X on a small scale it makes A even more contemptible.
> No company that uses a double Irish tax structuring scheme to avoid paying billions has any right to cast guilt on consumers who legally purchase phones and take advantage of minor arbitrage opportunities.
What guilt is being cast here exactly? The company used automated tools to disable accounts that were found to breach their ToS, likely the majority of which were bots.
I mean it's one thing to complain if these people were false positives, but they actually weren't.
What happened to these people sucks. I get that. But you make it sound as if someone at Google specifically targeted these people's accounts on purpose, when it's significantly more likely that they were just trying to disable bot accounts for scalpers and didn't realize some people were using their real accounts to help scalpers.
Do you think they are stupid enough to not realize how bad the backlash from this would be?
>"The company used automated tools to disable accounts that were found to breach their ToS, likely the majority of which were bots."
In the US, there's a concept called right of first sale that protects people's ability to resell what they buy to others. Sales contracts preventing resale have lost many times in courts. From my perspective Google trying to prevent "scalping", as you put it, is already overreach, regardless of what verbiage they might have shoved in their TOS or the massive legal resources they can deploy to get their way.
Furthermore deactivating someone's gmail without even letting them export their data is profoundly destructive on the victim's lives.
> Sadly, it appears Google has abandoned their former motto, "Don't be evil"
It was at a time Balmer made Microsoft look bad.Now that he is out, Google looks as bad as Microsoft, even worse, at least when you have a issue with a Microsoft product there is the community and some kind of support.
It's overwhelmingly likely that without the massive media backlash, Google would have carried out their "digital executions" on their otherwise defenseless customers. I don't say this lightly and it pains me to say it but they need to be regulated.