Google Could Face Class-Action Lawsuit Over Free G Suite Legacy Account Shutdown

On Wednesday, Google announced that it is getting rid of the G Suite legacy free edition, "which allowed those that snuck in before 2012 to get free Google apps services tied to a custom domain rather than Gmail," reports Android Police. Since a lot of people will be left "in the lurch" after the shutdown, attorneys at Chimicles Schwartz Kriner & Donaldson-Smith are opening an investigating into the matter for a potential class-action lawsuit. From the report: No lawsuit has been filed yet; the attorneys involved are just collecting information for a potential lawsuit in the future once all the facts are straight (and Google has had time to reconsider its actions). When we covered the original news of the legacy G Suite shutdown, it seemed unreasonable to us, because customers using those legacy accounts are unable to transfer purchases or things like grandfathered subscription discounts to new accounts. When we asked if moving purchases between accounts might be possible, a Google representative confirmed it wasn't. [...] That means years of purchases tied to Google Play -- potentially hundreds to thousands of dollars of assets like movie and music purchases for a given customer, across thousands of affected customers -- could be tied to broken accounts because of the transition. Google explicitly confirmed to us that was the case, though customers could elect to keep using their broken suspended account alongside a working one. In essence, everyone that migrated to one of these accounts while they were still offered (from 2006 at least until 2012, so far as I can tell) will have to pay extra money to keep their existing purchases tied to a fully working account, and we think that's pretty ridiculous.

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