Lost in Google translation (from utopia to dystopia) by Lucas Hurni

One morning I woke up with an email from Google, saying that the Google Ads account of the company was suspended. Suspended definitively.

The email proposed to fill a form to make an appeal of this decision.

We didn’t know why our account was suspended, we didn’t know which ad could have triggered the suspension, so we decided to call Google Ads support.

This was efficient, 2 minutes later I was on the phone with someone from Google.

I asked for the reasons for the suspension and I explained that this suspension impacted thousands of our customers.

The person from Google told me that our account was suspended because one of our client’s ads was advertising counterfeit goods. So I asked naively that they tell us which ad was problematic so we could remove it and reopen the account.

But that’s not how a techno-monopolistic conglomerate works…

The Google employee told me that they cannot tell me which ad was problematic, neither explain to me how they decided that the products were counterfeits, and that the suspension of our account was maybe definitive and that we can’t open a new Google Ads account.

So we filled out the appeal form, providing proofs of the authenticity of our clients' goods and explaining that there must have been a mistake.