Google Could Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Free G Suite Legacy Account Shutdown (androidpolice.com) 46
On Wednesday, Google announced that it is getting rid of the G Suite legacy free edition, "which allowed those that snuck in before 2012 to get free Google apps services tied to a custom domain rather than Gmail," reports Android Police. Since a lot of people will be left "in the lurch" after the shutdown, attorneys at Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith are opening an investigating into the matter for a potential class-action lawsuit. From the report: No lawsuit has been filed yet; the attorneys involved are just collecting information for a potential lawsuit in the future once all the facts are straight (and Google has had time to reconsider its actions). When we covered the original news of the legacy G Suite shutdown, it seemed unreasonable to us, because customers using those legacy accounts are unable to transfer purchases or things like grandfathered subscription discounts to new accounts. When we asked if moving purchases between accounts might be possible, a Google representative confirmed it wasn't. [...]
That means years of purchases tied to Google Play -- potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars of assets like movie and music purchases for a given customer, across thousands of affected customers -- could be tied to broken accounts because of the transition. Google explicitly confirmed to us that was the case, though customers could elect to keep using their broken suspended account alongside a working one. In essence, everyone that migrated to one of these accounts while they were still offered (from 2006 at least until 2012, so far as I can tell) will have to pay extra money to keep their existing purchases tied to a fully working account, and we think that's pretty ridiculous.
That means years of purchases tied to Google Play -- potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars of assets like movie and music purchases for a given customer, across thousands of affected customers -- could be tied to broken accounts because of the transition. Google explicitly confirmed to us that was the case, though customers could elect to keep using their broken suspended account alongside a working one. In essence, everyone that migrated to one of these accounts while they were still offered (from 2006 at least until 2012, so far as I can tell) will have to pay extra money to keep their existing purchases tied to a fully working account, and we think that's pretty ridiculous.
You took the hook! (Score:3, Insightful)
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Because many of such fishing methods run afoul of relevant laws.
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Why complain now when they are reeling you in?
Though I agree with your sentiment, I think the answer is that Google could have done a better job providing a migration path. Giving users some means to downshift to a Gmail account, or to seamlessly transfer their ownership of Play Store apps and Youtube channels and so forth to another Google account.
I'm not saying that the lawsuit is completely merited, nor am I saying that Google should feel some moral obligation to design systems to handle free users because the free users are owed something from Goog
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But it's hard to see any situation where Google forces people to pay a monthly charge to access content they had already bought, and had bought on the understanding there would be no additional charges, where Google would win a lawsuit defending that in court.
It's not clear what you're saying... If you're saying that Google would lose a court case around a bait-and-switch tactic thereby entrapping customers into a paid subscription for continued access to previously purchased goods? Yes, agreed. Especially because Google is still maintaining the digital locker for all other customers at no additional fees, but unilaterally stipulating additional financial outlays just because customers had used one eligible account over another eligible account.
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And just to be clear: Years 0-2 are mostly free (time for raising for service awareness and public interest), yrs 3-5 were focused on soft transitioning (free to pro tiers), and yrs 5+ (usually in 2-3 yr increments) are lower-tier service degradation (harder push for migration). At year 15 it's cut-em-at-the-knees (
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This isn't the first time. When Google Music closed you lost any purchases you had made. There was at least the option to transfer to YouTube Music, but if you missed it then you were SOL.
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This isn't the first time. When Google Music closed you lost any purchases you had made. There was at least the option to transfer to YouTube Music, but if you missed it then you were SOL.
Google Music is actually a somewhat-better example of how Google did it right. In addition to transferring to Youtube Music, they also let you download your music as MP3 files, either individually or as one big massive ZIP file. I still have mine.
I'd agree with you that the window of time should have been longer, or that the migration to YTM should have been automatic or opt-out, but i'm hard pressed to achieve consensus that "the ability to download all of your purchases and/or migrate to YT Music" was an
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Re: You took the hook! (Score:2)
Re: You took the hook! (Score:2)
Finally! A use-case for NFTs!!!
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That's not really what's happening, this summary from TFA is sketchy... Google's statement is very different from the summary.
If true, that is indeed different from the summary. AFAIK, you can log into multiple accounts simultaneously on all Google devices, so all you need to do to "migrate" is create a new gmail account then log into that account as well on your devices.
It's not the most elegant migration path (i.e. they should let you just export purchases to a new account), but it is far from "google blocking access to paid services"
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They aren't "broken" just because you can't access Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet.
A google account that can't access gmail, calendar, drive and meet is NOT broken? Huh. They are certainly making it difficult to keep your email address by doing this. And I can see how all kinds of logins will become screwed up if you lose access to an email address. If you are in this situation you will have to go find every place you use the old email address that is slated to stop working and change it. Otherwise you are likely to end up locked out of various services. It sounds pretty screwed up to m
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Sure, like literally any Google account you open with your (not necessarily Google hosted) email. You're thinking about "Gmail account" (this thing started as "Gmail for your domain" too, "free forever" advertised no less, of course with small print we can change anything whenever we like). But no, the Google account it's the account you needed mostly for play purchases but of course it works across many products, most not
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You may be surprised to learn that Google Voice accounts under Workspace will now become paid only, even if you already chose to pay monthly to continue using your Workspace account. So you'll now be paying for Workspace + GVoice. There is discussions on Reddit of people transferring their accounts to a free gmail account in order to save the GVoice number. But you will need to act quickly because at the end of January GVoice gets an overhaul and the legacy interface which allows transfers will be removed e
Re: The Google Play purchases are the serious prob (Score:2)
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They aren't "broken" just because you can't access Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet.
If you can't access Drive then many apps bought on Google Play break, as they use Drive for back-end data, backup, and, quite importantly, settings storage.
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The problem is that all of these apps, and I have hundreds, expect that they can communicate with you over the account that you used in Google Play. So the updates, alerts, reminders, etc that can no longer be used seriously degrades our ability to use the apps which we paid for, through no fault of our own. This is just stupidity on Google's behalf.
Re:The Google Play purchases are the serious probl (Score:5, Insightful)
First they need to issue a statement to us Google Apps / G-Suite / Whatever we are called customers/users. So far the only information I have seen are the various reports noting that Google has sent info to the owners of said accounts.
I'm not sure about others, but I have received zero communications about this change from Google.
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I'm also curious about this, as I have received no notice. Some news reports mentioned *steep discounts*, but I can't find any information on this.
My primary concern is that I don't just have one account, I have about a dozen that are used in various ways. I don't want to have to pay for all of them, and merging (while possible) will be a PITA especially because of the size limits.
can steam epic games, sony, xbox do the same? (Score:2)
can steam epic games, sony, xbox do the same?
with and pay more or get less push? /mo you will lose all of your fully paid and OWNED games with no way to move them to offline forever access?
By saying your free account will end and unless you pay XX
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can steam epic games, sony, xbox do the same?
They probably can. It's undoubtedly in some obscure clause written in dense legalese way down their EULAs. The same ones that establish any dispute must be solved via arbitration, at an arbiter they pay for and thus is definitely fair and just and in no way giving them a 99%+ win rate, and that you give up your right to use the courts or to take part in class-action lawsuits.
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If Google can arbitrarily start charging you $6-10 a month for access to the things you've bought from them, deleting access to that content when you don't pay, then who the fuck is going to be stupid enough to buy anything from Google Play going forward?
Oh how very little you understand of the human condition.
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I don't understand why a company as big as Google with all its resources can't figure out a way to let people transfer all purchases made on these accounts to another, free account.
Are their systems really that badly designed that something like this can't be done? They only have to do it once, after all, and it would pretty much solve these issues.
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I don't understand why a company as big as Google with all its resources can't figure out a way to let people transfer all purchases made on these accounts to another, free account.
Because then they wouldn't get people all their less-than-savvy formerly-grandfathered users desperately scrambling to start paying $10/month. Shareholders wouldn't be happy with them for not only not getting that extra-milked, very legit, hardly won "growth", but spending money to not "grow".
Evidently, bad PR can cause even more severe profit losses, so if this generates too many complaints and negative reporting they may realize it's cheaper to actually spend that money. But only if that happens. If not,
You gambled, you lost (Score:1)
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maybe in the usa but in the EU with real protectio (Score:2)
maybe in the usa but in the EU with real protection laws?
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What Google's actions would amount to is unilateral broad digital license revocation WITHOUT EVER VIOLATING THE TERMS and no penalty-free alternatives for access to the virtual goods... like a backup-and-restore method with any other broker (their Google Play store but account tied to personal rather than business account).
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They need to offer an alternate free conversion (Score:3)
The main problem I'm going to have in moving somewhere else is the fact that Gmail's spam filtering is pretty much bulletproof, and I don't expect to be able to replicate that anywhere else. I *might* be able to transition my data to a free account and simply set up an email forwarding server to bounce my domain back into those accounts, because it appears to be possible to change the From: address of any account so I can make it all behave as if the domain is still Gmail-hosted.
OTOH, if they would offer a transition from the legacy free Workspaces to a limited version that kept the domain association but otherwise restricted me to the services I can get for free from any other Google account, I'd be perfectly fine. The *only* feature of Workspaces that I use that is at all different from a standalone totally "free" account is the domain association.
Nevermind the fact that I can be absolutely sure that Google is making just as much indirect money off of my legacy Workspace account in the form of advertising and other datamining as they do off the equivalent free account, so the claim of extra costs is total BS. The one "extra" I use (domain mapping) *might* cost them a penny or two per year in extra CPU...
At least I have no "purchases" associated with my account, because I knew something exactly like this was going to happen ever since companies first started to let you "buy" content. They were *always* going to pull the rug, and I wasn't going to take the bait.
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For what it's worth, I moved off of my grandfathered free Google "Workspace" account several years ago and switched the mail/calendar/contacts service to Fastmail. It took a few weeks for the spam filter to get trained properly to my incoming mail, but since then it's been damn near perfect. No complaints at all from that front. I've been very satisfied with the mail service, price, and the clueful employees they have.
Re: They need to offer an alternate free conversio (Score:1)
Completely agree, I'm in the same boat but I doubt they'll do that
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change the From: address of any account
Google broke that years ago. You can change the From Address but everyone will see your emails as "From yournewfreeaccount12@gmail.com on behalf of you@yourdomain.tld". The only way to avoid this is to configure Gmail to send all outgoing email using your forwarding provider's SMTP infrastructure.
obligatory (Score:4, Insightful)
What does the EULA say? (Score:2)
When signing up for the free G Suite service, I'm sure we "signed" an extensive EULA equivalent contract. Nobody of course read it nor quoted it so far but I can assume Google put in a provision defending it from this kind of decision
This is a mess! (Score:1)
I've used gmail services with my own domain since the beginning. Email isn't the problem. Email can be redirected. The problem is the google account. I want to migrate my now Google workspace accounts to a personal gmail account. Google won't let me do that.
I can't share my play purchases with my family. Google wont let me do that, as family link isn't available for legacy Gapps users.
Of course I should have foreseen this inn 2003 when I started using gmail, with my own domain....