This feels like a huge gap in consumer protections. Retaliatory account bans seem like they should not be legal when a retailer fails to deliver. Of course this is all exacerbated by how large the entities in question are and how the same account may govern access to multiple services.

Especially ejecting someone from e.g. their email if the payment isn't email related.

It's ripe for anti-trust action.

Unfortunately, the political climate of the US is not ripe for anti-trust action, at least not with any teeth.

I feel like this is treating the symptoms rather than the cause. Companies shouldn’t be allowed to have such a tight grip on a consumer’s digital life such that an account ban is crippling.

They're both problems. Smaller companies shouldn't be able to retaliate against a valid chargeback either.

Should they be able to retaliate against an invalid chargeback? Chargeback fraud is a thing.

Sure!

But only if they have reasonable system for telling the difference.

Everyone thinks their system is reasonable, that's the whole problem. Banks obviously don't think chargeback fraud is fraud when they perform fraudulent chargebacks. They think they're reasonably legit, which is why they perform them. Retailers also think their fraud prevention systems are reasonable. Reasonable means different things to different people and it certainly doesn't mean infallible.

Nobody in any of these situations thinks they are being unreasonable.

> Everyone thinks their system is reasonable

Okay? I didn't say they get to choose. Was the implication of "shouldn't be able" not clear enough? You'd have externally imposed rules.

And in this case google hasn't expressed that they think the process was reasonable, they're just refusing to do anything.

Agreed.

Steam froze my account to punish a PayPal dispute, the amount they would not refund was ~£2. Their refusal was contrary to UK law.

Small story about Steam. They sold me a broken game, in UK one can return broken things according to the Consumer Rights Act, specifically including digital goods. Steam said, at length, they would not refund me: the game would crash (losing some settings) after ~30 minutes, I spent more than 2h of playtime trying to fix it [it's a 50h+ game, I'd have accepted an 8p reduction in my refund!].

I complained to PayPal. PayPal decided in my favour -- ie in keeping with UK law. Steam didn't dispute PayPal's findings but instead froze my Steam account (and I assume paid PayPal the money back). PayPal made me whole, financially.

My Steam account was blocked for a month or so. Ongoing they "punish" me by making it hard for me to give them money -- which is good for me, but my kids are not keen!

WhyTF would I complain over a few £. It's the principle, clearly.

It was very interesting to me to see how a big company can ignore the law in this way. But also spend what must amount to quite a bit of customer service time just to avoid a minimal refund.

All I wanted was a refund for a game Steam sold, that was broken and wouldn't be fixed. I did cursory searching for bugs before buying, but hadn't found this particular one before my purchase.

You know what I did with the refund money, bought the next game in the same series, because it was only the bug that I didn't like, and I paid more money for it than the game they wouldn't refund ... mad, eh!