He was a domain squatter with text directing people to click on the google ads. He's violating the TOS at the time in multiple ways, and clearly isn't providing any value.
Spending time holding the hand of every pissed off squatter/spammer isn't in Google's interest.
And those rights / obligations are listed in the Terms of Service, where he was explicitly told he didn't have the "right" to an explanation. He may deserve one in our eyes, but he has no legal ground to demand it as a 'right'.
This is the same argument made for sealed, private laws.
Look, closing someone's account and taking their money for unspecified "reasons" is wrong, if not illegal. Banks can't do it. Credit card companies can't do it. Any account where you leave money... can't do it.
Maybe this guy was sketchy, but here's how Google has to handle these things:
* stop showing ads
* close the account for all future ads
* give a window of time for him to disburse the money he
already earned for clicks, and if he withdraws in that time, great, otherwise, too bad for him
* close the account permanently
Thomas Fuchs, who wrote Script.aculo.us, had over $2k stolen by Google in this manner. As you can see, http://script.aculo.us/ is clearly not domain squatting nor does it tell people to click. It's a bonafide OSS project used by hundreds of thousands of people.
So why was his money seized? We'll never know, eh?
Google also closed my Checkout account under similar circumstances. Namely, I did nothing wrong. The only reason I got my money back was because my blog post got such incredible traffic that it started a debate on the internal mailing list.
Why was my account closed? Well gee, after I got 60,000 reads, they claimed it was a "technical glitch" -- but I know this to be a lie because a little birdie inside told me what was going on.
But every time you tell people what they do wrong they can begin to figure out how the abuse detection works.
What if the threshold is at 25 domains, so instead people start opening multiple accounts that run only 24 domains. By telling people what precisely got them booted they can start varying parameters to see what the triggering mechanism is.
Well, you could be sufficiently vague - "Your account has been terminated for domain squatting on domain http://i-squat-here.com would tell him why his account had been terminated, but wouldn't reveal any sensitive information.
And google's contactability for valid issues does still suck, with some exceptions.
No, the problem is really that information disclosure is very tricky. The very fact that you get the notice "you were domain squatting on X" is actually useful for exploits.
Whats the line where Google considers something domain squatting? Lets say its domain squatting if you have less than 5 pages of content, simply create tons of accounts with varying levels of content. What if the signal is "has tons of domains", then run Adsense on tons of domains and see what the threshold is.
That is like saying that the government should not tell us what is illegal because we may exploit the law. The way government deals with this is by allowing courts to make law.
The alternative would be what google does. Say nothing and leave no way of protecting oneself.
Namely, he had two other websites that had content and he had ads on that were valid uses of adsense. Whether the $761 was divided 60/40 or 10/90 is hard to say. One website should not void your terms for other (fair-use) sites.
The other websites are not separate matters, though. They're all services provided as part of an agreement that he violated. And it looks like he violated that agreement knowingly and flagrantly.
Google saying that it is against their TOS doesn't make the legality of it valid. Yes, he "may" have been in the wrong for THAT site (although google did introduce a service two days later for his situation), but their conditions for refusal of service are horribly "evil." (Do they even refund the adwords users that had to pay?)
Is there really freedom when you sign that contract though? Freedom of contract refers to cases where both parties are able to negotiate.
In this particular case this goes under unfair contractual terms, which is the way the law protects the small guy against the big guy who only has one contract and you either accept it or not. It is like a supermarket saying that we will not refund products of a very low quality. Your option is either to not buy anything in any supermarket, cus sure if it was legal they all would want to have that term in their contract, or buy and have no way of recourse.
"And the worst part about this all is that it states in the AdSense Terms of Service (TOS) that Google has the right to suspend any account without prior notification or explanation, and refund all of the earnings in that account to the respective advertisers."
So, in other words, there was literally nothing on that page that wasn't a TOS violation.
I've been sympathetic to other complaints about Google cutting off service without explanation. But in this case, in Google's shoes, I'd be struggling to give any response much politer than, "FOAD. If possible, DIAF."
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rustybrick/3607264237/