If you sue google they'll close your entire google account, which in turn can cause a lot of issues for a lot of people. I personally refuse to use gmail in part because of this- if you have a problem with one google service you risk losing access to all of them.

There’s more to the story though - Google is actually collateral damage in this case and had nothing to do with locking the phone.

Best Buy scammed them by selling them a phone that automatically locks itself to the first carrier it sees, which is T-Mobile since Fi runs on that.

A small claims court case against Best Buy or even a warranty claim should sort it.

This is generally news to the hyper-libertarian HN clientele but I am pretty sure enforcing your rights as a consumer isn't supposed to open you up to retaliation in the US.

It’s not unusual. They decide that they don’t want to do business with you anymore. It can be included in their TOS that pre-arbitration is mandatory. By you going directly to civil courts you are breaching their TOS which is a reason for termination.

> By you going directly to civil courts you are breaching their TOS which is a reason for termination

That's a novel theory. So if I sue the power company because a cherry picker rear-ended my 1978 land yacht they can just shut me off in -20 winter weather because I sued them?

I didn’t say that. In your example, you are a consumer of a public service. In the Google case you are a user of a private service.

No, I'm a consumer of a giant publicly traded company that rides on some amount of publicly funded infrastructure. Hmm... sounds like Google a bit doesn't it?

> That's a novel theory.

This is not novel at all - patent cross-licensing has been using similar language for decades: "Your license to our bag of patents is valid unless you take us to court - then all bets are off". It's a very short jump from patent licensing to Terms of Service, I bet there's a lot of related case law.

Quite different as disputes between businesses are seen quite differently from consumer and business disputes.

The protections in the US are not nearly as strong as, say, Germany, where it's entirely possible that a grocery store can't ban you because they're the only place to shop. The right to do business with who you wish is more protected in the US. At the same time, there are laws about and the courts look poorly on retaliating on a weaker party for seeking legitimate redress.