OK, I did see that.

But I don't understand why Google would do that. For most users, aren't Google Docs files a substantial part of their usage? Or do people mainly store backups?

Simple, Google wants to encourage people to use their office suite so they indirectly subsidise it in this way.

FTA "A single google doc can store about a million characters. This is around 710KB of base64 encoded data."

This means that in order to reach the limit of the drive space given away for free, they'd need something like 15,000 Google Doc files (15GB) if they counted toward your space limit. I doubt a lot of paying customers even reach that.

The real limit (file size) is reached by binaries. Videos and PDFs, usually.

I see.

But then, I suspect (as others note) that Google will notice when you have 50GB of Google Docs full of base64.

Seems an iffy way to store stuff.

There's a good chance they won't. For privacy reasons, engineers can't just start peering at your files.

They'd have to write a base64 detectors and automate the detection and banning of the accounts without the engineer ever seeing your files.

Any bugs in that code, and they'll ban innocent people.

Wouldn't it be simpler to just set a generous limit for the number of Google Docs files? Say, 15 thousand?

I bet implementing such a limit would be 3 or more months of engineering effort.

Think about the difficulties. It has to take into account shared directories. It has to know about systems which auto-create documents (like results sheets for Google forms). It has to work with gsuite sysadmins who need to take ownership of files from deleted accounts. The UI to show when you have hit the limit has to be designed. And the support team has to be trained on how to resolve that error. And you're going to have to get that error message translated into 30 languages. Users already over the limit are going to be unhappy - are you going to write extra code to give them a grace period? How will you notify them of that? Will you have a whitelist of users allowed to go over the limit? How will you keep the whitelist updated and deployed to the servers? Who will have access to add/remove people from the whitelist?

The actual system itself has race conditions:. What if that 15000th file was simultaneously created in the USA and Europe? There is no way to prevent that without a cross-ocean latency penalty. Do you want to pay that penalty for every document creation? How do you deal with a net-split where cross ocean network traffic is delayed?

Finally, how will you monitor it? Will you have logging and alerting for users hitting the limit? Will there be an emergency override for engineers to remove the limit if necessary?

At big-web-service scale, simple engineering problems become complex problems fast...

OK, not simpler.

So what? They might end up nuking some accounts, when some symptom pops up. And there'd be no recourse, whether or not it was a false positive.