Taking down all his projects (not just 12ft) is heavy-handed, but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me:
> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses.
> Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
The 12ft guy doesn’t look so great in that thread. He admits to ignoring the email (gosh I was busy mmkay?) and then argues that Vercel is lying about the extra work they had to do.
Sure, but if you go on vacation and don't check your email for two weeks, you can't really claim “no warning”. If two weeks isn’t sufficient notice because of vacation it’s fine to say so, but it’s not the same thing as “no warning” just because you’re not checking email.
To take it even further, if you're a one man operation, not checking emails regarding your operation for two weeks is pure negligence, vacation or not.
I might ignore personal project emails while I'm on vacation, but I also won't complain if one of those emails says my billing method is out of date and I come home and it's been turned off.
But if you missed one bill for a service and your account was nuked for all the other products you had paid without issue, you'd be right to get mad, and that's exactly what's happening here:
> I’m sympathetic to vercel here. Honestly very reasonable to take down 12ft with no response in 2 weeks.
> but otherwise Guillermo’s response in that thread seems pretty reasonable to me
“Other than the completely unreasonable thing, they seemed pretty reasonable”.
I mean he's not being a complete asshole in the discussion here[1], but nuking the entire customer's account for a ToS violation on one specific product still isn't a reasonable move. Yes Google and Amazon do it routinely, but if you're not a trillion dollar monopoly and you care about your business' reputation, you shouldn't behave like those.
[1] CEOs behaving like assholes in Twitter discussions isn't supposed to be the norm.
If you violate the TOS of a free service, it’s not on them to surgically split your account into “offending” and “non-offending” parts, especially if they reach out to you to try to work with you to remove the offending parts and you don’t respond for two weeks.
There's no surgery involved and yes it is on them. Actually they retroactively did so when he complained, and as such they agreed that nuking everything was the wrong move.
Also, the “offending part” has been well known from them for several years (they even claim it costed them a lot in support over the years) so it's not like they received a DMCA and had to take everything down in a hurry, they knew exactly what product they wanted to stop because they did stop it because it was too costly. The fact that it violated their TOS is just the legal justification for the closure, not its source.
> Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the outreach from the impacted businesses.
> Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.