I wait for the day that this conduct becomes illegal, because it can destroy people's lives. It is actually surprising that consumer protection laws do not yet address the issue of due process.
The Digital Services Act requires that if on the basis of law/copyright or terms of service violation the service is doing any of the following actions, then there are things it must do: removing or hiding content, stop providing service to a user, suspend/terminate a user's account, or suspend/terminate monitation for a peice of content or user.
It must provide a clear explanation of why they are suspending the account, including the precise grounds on which they are relying. If the action is being taken due to feeling some piece of information violates the terms of service, they must identify which term they feel was violated, and an explanation of why they feel the information violates that term. They must clearly indicate if automatic processing was used to come to this decision.
For only online service that is not a micro or small enterprise they must:
Provide a complaint handling system for appealing these decisions, where the user can explain why they feel the decision is incorrect. The appeals must be handled by qualified staff, not solely based on automated means.
The law originally had binding out-of-court arbitration as a mechanism to resolve disputes here (like a company refusing to consider a well founded appeal within the 6 month window), but the latest version has downgraded it to non-binding arbitration ("dispute settlement bodies"). If the consumer wins, the service provider has to cover all costs of the arbitration, but technically they are not bound to do as the arbitrator decided. If the customer loses it must pay its portion, which is free or a nominal charge. Only if a customer file the dispute "manifestly in bad faith", does the customer ever need to cover the service's portion.
Bottom line the behavior shown here by oracle would be a massive violation for failing to provide an explanation, and failure to offer the required dispute mechanism.
I would assume it is contract based and thus falls already under contract law. You could start a civil case. There is no need to make something illegal that already has ways to get resolved.
Part of the problem in the US is that a civil courtcase is a horrible thing. At least in Europe the loser pays the court costs of the winner. That already makes this kind of behaviour less likely. In the US you have to spend lots of money on a court case and they will just drag it out and bleed you dry. The court system is designed to protect the rich minority from the poor majority.
Also, do not throw away the baby with the bathwater. A shop owner should have ways to get rid of a bad customer. And yes, even if it is just based on a face that you don't like.
Once a platform is past a certain size, they should no longer be allowed to permanently ban a person without due process.
See for example the people whose lives have been affected because they were banned from Facebook for absolutely no reason, and they could no longer access Facebook Marketplace. I think it's very dangerous to create a new type of second-class citizen that can no longer access certain online services, because naive algorithms were allowed to go rampant, without any checks and balances.
Unless there is fraud checks involved, I don't think the person's account is banned. It may be suspended and in which case this can be rectified by adding a payment method and upgrading the account from the free tier to a paid tier.
They can still access oracle cloud services... just not for free.
As a note, think about the egress charges they were racking up (on a free tier) by doing a mongodump for five hours.
The free tier is meant as a teaser for migrating to a paid account - not a perpetual production workload.
Not for 5 hours. Five hours ago. Author is talking about a "huge" database, but then mentioned 1GB, which is tiny. In that case there were no significant egress charges.
That customer support chat is from someone else from April 25th.
It is not from the blog poster. There is no indication that the blog poster communicated with Oracle Support in that blog post. Everything from Oracle support in the blog post is from other people and paraphrased Q&A on the Oracle Community Support forum (where the support became a private correspondence with the person rather than out in the open).
At the very end:
> Q: Did you create a thread in Oracle Community forum?
> A: Yes, no answers.
And digging into the FAQ for the free tier...
> Does Oracle Cloud Free Tier include service level agreements (SLAs) and technical support?
> Oracle Cloud Free Tier does not include SLAs. Community support through our forums is available to all customers. Customers using only Always Free resources are not eligible for Oracle Support. Limited support is available for Oracle Cloud Free Tier with Free Trial credits. After you use all of your credits or after your trial period ends (whichever comes first), you must upgrade to a paid account to access Oracle Support. If you choose not to upgrade and continue to use Always Free Services, you will not be eligible to raise a service request in My Oracle Support.
People underestimate the cost, time and other resources associated with a court case. Especially the stress.
My employer (a tiny company) sued another company because they owed them a bunch of money. We are in the right, legally and ethically. The amount of time, stress and money it takes to sue someone, even if you are 100% in the right, even when the law is 100% on your side - it is insane.
The only real winners are the lawyers. It is better to just avoid companies with shitty service than go to the courts.
You just bypass their legal department by filing a small claims case. Do it in CA, you can sue for up to 10K in damages.
A valet crashed my car, I sued for diminished value for 9999.99 dollars. Their attorney told me I would never see a penny, told me they would move for change of venue and tie me up in civil court. I went to court, won, they appealed, I won again. About 5 days later I had a check in the mail for 9999.99. I paid 100 bucks to file and serve them through the police department and had to take two days off, but I won and it was kind of easy.
They can bring an attorney to represent them, didn't seem to help them in my case with zero legal expertise.
> Good luck winning any kind of lawsuit against Oracle also.
They don't always win, but it can be hard to see if the case does not go to trial. Settlements typically include confidentiality provisions to prevent publication of the result. [0]
I discovered recently that my bank (in Germany) can cancel my account without cause. My best guess is they were purging the books of Americans, they refused to tell me the reason, but my takeaway is that if this can happen in the consumer-protection nirvana that is the EU, don’t hold your breath waiting for exploitative practices to be outlawed.
Indeed, my other German bank will promptly disown me if I stop living in Germany, but they at least are upfront about it.
Leaving aside my annoyance at the first bank's behavior, it was a definite learning moment, in that I had assumed a "normal" bank could not just kick you out because they feel like it. In Germany, indeed they can!
Well sort-of. They have to give two months' written notice, and they did, and I was very lucky to catch it in time as I'd been traveling and they had of course not bothered to send me an e-mail nor call any of the three numbers they had for me.
So I had about a week's warning and I was able to transfer my money out to other accounts. Had I not done that, they would presumably have held on to it until I'd gone in and personally told them where to send it, which would have locked me out of my money had I been abroad -- it was my primary account, held in good standing for 13 years.
Sure, it starts with due process for the customer and spreads like a cancer to the employees...no thanks. Democracy will not be tolerated here. --Corp Overlords
