And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
Luckily I use a custom domain so accounts won't need to be updated, just emails exported and DNS changed.
We should really find a way to break the tightly coupling to these platforms, including mobile carriers, and not have to live in fear.
Having a real representative of each platform in a government branch under regular hours that citizens can access with their documents so that any issues with it can be dealt is a good first step.
Total bans are convenient for the big platform providers, but they are big enough to be regulated such that people don't lose access to everything, and that there are timely and responsive ways to challenge their decisions.
If the industry can't do that on its own, it's a job for the regulators.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
https://www.androidauthority.com/google-account-bans-3654171...
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
If your account is that valuable, it's time to consider moving to a self-hosted option. Or at the very least, start by purchasing a domain and linking it to your Google account, while keeping offline backups of all your emails and documents.
The real problem isn't that Google might accidentally ban you; it's that there's no way to get a human in the loop to review the issue. My client is an enterprise GCP user paying a hefty sum every month and getting someone knowledgeable typically means wading through Gemini or talking to (non-technical) support who just read GCP documentation back to you; and it can take months something to get resolved. Now imagine the situation for someone paying nothing or a double-digit for their gmail account or workspace.
I'm aware people will complain that self-hosting is hard, insecure, etc. but it's like a backup: an annoying process you truly appreciate when shit hits the fan.
Personally, this is why I foresee Anthropic/OpenAI/Google taking a bath once their creditors come calling. I think the individuals most attached to a specific app are the ones least willing to pay the true cost of inference. (IE: your grandma using chatgpt to ask for recipe recommendations probably isn't going to pay $400/mo).
I don't care if my Claude or OpenAI account is banned, but risking a Google account is different.
1. https://www.pcworld.com/article/3104521/teenagers-gemini-mis...
Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths that sell you to advertisers. Those smaller E-mail providers will have actual support that you can contact in case of problems and will not "ban you".
I am also fairly confident that nobody sees the moderation decisions either.
Nowadays, with a Google account being all but required to use a non-Apple smartphone, it's even worse.
For reference, when my wechat account was blocked a few years ago, I got escalated to talking a real person and sorted everything out in a few days.
The VSCode Antigravity extension I was using turns out to be a 3rd-party one. I found out only today that there's an official extension too, which I think wasn't there earlier.
Is OpenAI the only one that allows this? Because Codex without codex is fantastic.
Seriously: I roll my own harness over OpenRouter and GPT 5.6, and it is genuinely better than CC+Fable for my maths and programming use cases.
The one thing Fable 5.1 still tops out on is the ability to take a simple "Let's engage in an interactive complexity-removing session" and materialize abstractions and semantics quickly.
This is something I've seen happen a lot with Google- their employees (especially the director+ folks) are absolutely rabid on social media when it comes to defending their products, and they don't let little things like "facts" get in the way.
Google needs to get a better social media policy because they look like clowns when they do this.
Also keep in mind nobody reads the TOS. The TOS is pure Wilhoitism: it exists to protect Google and bind you. There is plenty of shit that gets put in there that Google never intends to do to 90%+ of their customers, but they have to reserve the right to do this anyway. You can infer the general shape of business policy from the the TOS but not the exact details.
The only people who actually know anything about Google's business policies are the people in the risk department doing enforcement. The CxO level might have be consulted about specific policies, but a lot of stuff isn't going to rise to their level until it blows up and becomes a PR disaster.
[0] I call this the "Maoists in the Risk Department": in general, there is a tendency of all businesses to independently reinvent Maoism when enforcing rules with their customers. You actively discourage "edge-touching" behavior from your customers by making the rules murky and incomprehensible.
Remember that this is a TOS, so you gotta presume that they will act as malicious as possible within the text.
I wonder if that would get my google account banned? If so i'm definitely taking agy out of the provider options..
If I write my own harness, is that third party?
Insane policy
Why bother creating a CLI and OAuth interface if your ToS punishes for using it
If you register a new OAuth client and generate access tokens for it to call the API, then you are following the rules.
They un-banned him later, but that was enough to stay away. There are much better services than Antigravity out there.
But now! Oh man, the mechanization against humanity proceeding rapidly apace.
You can have "verified" account (for 18+ and Gmail), bank card added, active AI Pro subscription, and still you won't be able to use even the free tier of Antigravity.
And their verification is some major AI slop that just doesn't work. This is open from June but this was already a bug in Gemini CLI before then: https://github.com/google-antigravity/antigravity-cli/issues...
GOOG is like a soulless, flesh eating antihuman robot, junkie monopoly-behemoth. Terrible UI/UX, very good models, braindead execution. Protected entity, just like NVDA.
Btw Antigravity is the worst of all environments. No money for the braindead. Well, bring your money elsewhere, to small joes instead.
Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.