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Chris Brogan asks the tough questions about the internet Empire Google. What happens if you’re a user of Gmail and other Google services, and one day they disable your account?

Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn’t get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn’t get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That’s it.

Sounds like you’re going to spend a week or two pleading with Google tech support. Don’t expect answers, and don’t expect much help.
From Google:

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

In other words, helping a customer using a free service would cost us money, so get lost we don’t give a sh*t. If you keep bugging us we’ll send you more marketing lies like this.

I’ve had a growing concern about Google. I’ve never seen a case where a company gets to be the size of Google and actually does something good. There’s a bell curve in the corporate world, and generally the bigger they get, the crappier they become. I think Google’s on the way down at this point. They’ve peaked and they’re only going to become (more) evil after this. At this point I’m relying on the “free” services of monolithic corporations like Google too much.