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great article -- the latest in a long running saga. google must be nuts not to just cut the guy some slack, give him the $761 and then ask for his advice on how to fix up their crazily opaque cancellation rules regarding fraud detection. i love the blogger's conclusion: if google is going to truly give up on the "don't be evil" motto, how about just settling for "don't be assholes"? -- it'd be an improvement.

google's response just smacks of punishing the messenger.

He would have got his money if he took the $761 and STFU. That $761 was nothing to Google, but when he tells a million other people about it and they all want $761 they had no choice but to fight it tooth and nail.

yeah, but if he just cut and run, it wouldn't help anyone else in a similar situation.

Looks to me he was clearly in the wrong. That's what I thought since the first article. Good thing that Google appealed and won. They should not give in to little blackmailers.

>Looks to me he was clearly in the wrong.

the problem wasn't that he did the wrong thing, when he finally got the info he realised he'd breached the rules. it's just that he couldn't get any info from google as to what he'd done wrong, and therefore couldn't rectify it. they simply close *all* your accounts, take *all* the outstanding funds and inform you that you have been bad. all he wanted was a simple explanation and it took a court case before they would give him even the "you shouldn't have put 'pick a link' on your page."