Over the past week, we saw reports from Gemini CLI users experiencing account disruptions. These were the result of a series of Antigravity bans rolled out to address violations of the Antigravity ...
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Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account. There’s too much risk of cross damage. Imagine losing access to your Gmail because some Gemini request flags you as an undesirable. The digital death sentence of losing access to your email with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk.
Use a custom domain and don't use google for email.
And if you do use your gmail address just forward it and start to transition to something else. With time everything of importance has been transferred.
How do you even pull away from a Gmail address? I'm nearly twenty years into that service. Getting banned would be absolutely devastating...
Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email. I use Fastmail, but there are many other options.
Set up forwarding in Gmail to your new address.
Then, whenever you log in to a website or app with your Gmail, take a moment to change it to your new address. In a few weeks, most of your important accounts will be covered. In a few months, almost everything you still actively use will be done.
I did this ~5 years ago and the only thing that still arrives at my Gmail is spam.
By caseysoftware 2026-02-2817:29 Same here but ~8 years.
You can mitigate/speed the process using your password manager too.
I still use a filter in my email so that if something comes in under my Gmail, it gets a special tag that I can filter on and treat those as a todo list. Rarely happens beyond the occasional Google Meet connection.
By nextaccountic 2026-03-013:151 reply > Use your own domain to sign up for a paid email service, provided by a company that focuses on email.
Note you don't need to pay. just use zoho mail or any other free email that lets you bring your own domain. Switch email providers as needed without changing your domain
The trouble with paying is that if you forget to pay, you may lose email. (arguably this is also a problem with domains, generally you should pay some years in advance)
By genxy 2026-02-2816:55 Solid advice, but I want to double, watch out for things you only log into once a year.
Making a new local account on your machine is a good first step.
^this is the way.
You can buy a domain name for like $10 per year; I recommend getting it from porkbun.com.
Cloudflare.com is good too, EXCEPT if you buy your domain from them, you'll be required to use their nameservers until and unless you transfer your domain elsewhere (which you won't be able to do for a while). Though to be fair, their free DNS is good and lots of people use it anyway. It makes email setup slightly more complicated, but it's still doable.
Spaceship.com also has a pretty good reputation, but I think their customer service isn't as good, they're quite new, and they're owned by Namecheap (a bigger domain registrar with a much worse reputation).
Whatever you do, DO NOT buy from GoDaddy. Do not even search for the domain you're considering on GoDaddy. Literally any option is better than GoDaddy.
By far the most reliable TLD options are .com, .net, and .org. These will look relatively trustworthy for email, and the price stays very very stable from year to year. If you don't want to think about it, just get one of these. You can even still find single dictionary word domains for .org or .net relatively easily.
Do not buy any domain marked "premium". This means the owner of the TLD can change the price at renewal as dramatically as they want, for any reason (e.g. if you have a website hosted at that domain that becomes popular). Your $20 per year domain might suddenly become a $300 or $3000 per year domain for no reason but greed, and you wouldn't be able to do anything about it.
Non-premium nTLD's (.club, .horse, .rocks, .theater, etc) can increase quite dramatically in price, BUT the price is required to be set the same for all domains using that nTLD, so they can't target any individual person for having a successful website or whatever. Also, you can pre-buy up to 10 years, which locks in your price for those 10 years. I'd still not recommend them for a primary email, but it's better than buying a "premium" domain. Just be aware that the yearly price might unexpectedly increase in the future.
Some country code TLD's are also good, but for email, probably stay away from the ones that spammers like to use.
___
Anyway, what I actually originally meant to comment about is: if you set up forwarding from gmail and don't check that account regularly anymore, I recommend setting up a gmail filter rule that forwards all your gmail spam to you (their regular forwarding setting leaves it out and just sends it to the gmail spam folder). It's a little annoying to have to re-flag some of the spam as spam in your new email, but gmail has a habit of marking non-spam as spam for me, and if you're not regularly checking that spam folder you can easily miss important email.
I switched to a password manager (bitwarden) about 7 years ago. I have over 200 accounts (not all of them use my @gmail). it would take me weeks to convert those accounts to a new domain, if the application could even support it.
I will admit, many of the accounts are not needed any more. but the process will still be emotionally boring to filter through that.
By jllyhill 2026-03-0114:08 Do you use single email address on your domain or multiple for different purposes? Or do you have one main address and throwaway aliases for the one-time registration purposes? I see that the Fastmail provides a single inbox that can handle multiple addresses and wonder how does it work.
By wafflemaker 2026-02-2818:27 For quite some time (approx 8 years) I've used an email forwarding (Blur, but any works) to avoid spam.
This looks like perfect case for change of email, since lot of these accounts can be moved out from Gmail by changing the address that email is forwarded too.
Looks like all this hassle with generating a new email for each service pays for the second time (by ease of changing the main mail), in addition to spam and privacy protection.
By hellojesus 2026-02-2822:09 I did this but don't forward. Instead, every new email in Gmail I got would prompt me to go update that service's contact info for me.
It probably doesn't matter, but it made me feel a little better because that way Google wouldn't have direct info on to which email/domain I transfered (ignoring other Gmail contacts that start emailing me at my new address(es) ).
By ikidd 2026-02-2816:05 I just sold a domain I had for 25 years and used for everything including API endpoints, email, authentication, etc. It took a couple weeks to transition myself and my family/friends.
Pretty sure just moving emails would have take a lot less effort. I had the advantage of keeping the domain until I was ready to move, now imagine Google just turned it off one day and what your workload would be. I shudder to think about having to deal with that.
By ptero 2026-02-2817:35 Register your own domain, use a third-party provider to handle actual sending and receiving (I use proton, which makes the setup very easy), forward your Gmail to your personal domain address and as renewals and reminders come in switch your email on services to your personal domain.
After a year or two losing Gmail becomes an inconvenience; after a few more years it is nothing. As everything is now on your own domain name you can switch providers without affecting anything.
That's what I did about 5 years ago and my only regret is not doing it earlier.
By ok_dad 2026-02-2818:13 Just start changing addresses. Forward the rest. It takes about a year. Changing your name is way harder and tons of folks do that all the time.
By cadamsdotcom 2026-03-0113:14 I just migrated to Fastmail (on my domain), it’s fantastic. It works just like Gmail in every way I need, haven’t missed Gmail or Google Calendar one bit. It’s clearly made by people who know Gmail well and understand why it works the way it does. I thought it’d be a huge migration but it was actually boring. Search works, 20 years of emails just magically migrated over. Spam detection is better. Couldn’t be happier!
Accidentally typed gmail.com the other day, it took 4 seconds to load (Fastmail is instant) and when it finished loading there was an ad to try some paid Google service. Felt like a flashback to an abusive ex.
By bhuga 2026-02-2820:41 I moved away from a gmail address that was that old, dating back to the invitation-only days. It had become more spam than not, mostly other people who share my initials not knowing their own email addresses. But the possible devastation you mention was more worrying. It had become too much of a risk for my banking and identity generally to not own my email address.
I got a custom domain. I still host it on google, because I know how impossible it is for small companies to have a reasonable program to deal with insider threats. Because of that, I think only one of the giant companies can realistically provide secure email. And the google app suite is great. Now that I pay for google workspace, there's support and appeals available, and if they ban me anyway, I still control the domain and can regain access to everything.
I have not been able to delete the old address, even after 3 years. There are some things like Google Fi that can only use a non-workplace google account. Very, very rarely, I still get an email that matters on it. But I got to the point where I could stop checking it in about 2 months, and now I look at it about once a week quickly, more out of habit than anything else.
The switch was annoying, but not "hard". It was worth it.
By Gareth321 2026-03-019:14 I had my Gmail for almost 20 years and made the transition. It's annoying and time consuming but I think well worth it. I bought a domain and host it on iCloud. It's like $3/month for 6 email addresses (you can use it with the family). That includes a little cloud data and other services like hidden email addresses. DNS is handled by Cloudflare for free. Then start moving each service/login to the new email address. Every time you log into something, change the email address. I took the opportunity to update passwords and passkeys too, using Vaultwarden. I was lazy and had used similar passwords for a lot of services. Passwords are all long and unique now.
Now, even if Apple bans me, I can move my host within minutes. I never lose access to my email domain. It's much more professional and I can do catch-all. E.g. netflix@[domain.com]. This way I can see who sells my email address to spammers and block it.
Get your own domain so you can easily change providers in the future. Start with your password manager and change the address on all the accounts you have in there.
After a few years you'll notice you stop bothering to check your Gmail and you can delete it to close the address.
If you need motivation, skim the /r/GMail subreddit and see how many people are getting locked out daily.
By 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2026-02-2816:021 reply Do you have a recommendation for a major email provider as a fallback if you have to pick one?
I vaguely recall encountering a service that only accepted addresses from a whitelist of big providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc.), even @icloud did not qualify.
buy a domain.
create icloud account.
use their custom domain email setup (free btw) - https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540
Start replacing important account emails with your custom domain.
Every time you get an important email in gmail, login and update.
Bonus: icloud let's you create catch all emails, so you can create many burner emails such as hackernews@mydomain.com
By eviks 2026-03-0114:41 How is it free?
> When you subscribe to iCloud+, you can use a custom domain name
By ForHackernews 2026-02-2818:15 Sign up at fastmail.com, set up forwarding, change your "reply-to" address. A year later, you'll have nothing arriving in gmail except marketing cruft.
By danielheath 2026-02-2823:13 I switched to my own domain ages ago; it only took 2-3 years to stop getting relevant mail to the old one (I put a forwarding rule in place and just used the new one for everything).
Imported all my past mail on day one, forwarding meant I had one inbox only, and I only sent mail from the new domain. A few gentle “please stop using my old address” conversations with family.
By andrepd 2026-03-012:24 It's really not that hard. I switched about 10 years ago. Just every time you log in with your old email, replace it with your new one. Every time you email someone, email them from your new one with a note: "this is my new email". In a few months I had migrated everything to the new email.
By simonjgreen 2026-02-2818:57 It will never be easier than right now. Every day you stay, you dig their moat around you even deeper
By nextaccountic 2026-03-013:14 Begin with making a list of all services where you subscribed using gmail...
By svilen_dobrev 2026-02-2821:24 gmail uses IMAP.
make another mailbox (another provider - migadu, fastmail, proton, whoever) that has IMAP as well. (selfhosting.. is PITA. only if u really need it).
install some standalone mail-client - thunderbird, clawsmail, applemail, or k9 , aqua on android, whatever. Attach both mailboxes into that. Find out how to copy an e-mail from one folder into another.
Folder by folder, select all mails, copy from one mailbox into the other. Will take time.
(Beware, some clients (apple) will fuckup the mail-date, anything older than 5 years becomes 5 years old. or it shows like that. YMMV.)
i have made this multiple times, for 20+ years of mails...
By benhurmarcel 2026-02-2819:59 I just went through all accounts in my password manager, logged in and changed my email. It takes a little while but not that much.
By Hikikomori 2026-02-2815:541 reply Just have to get started and suffer for a while and make it a practice to switch emails when you log into places.
I switched to fastmail with my own domain.
By 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2026-02-2816:06 I went with SimpleLogin.
Although I am increasingly concerned with its longevity since there's a non-zero risk that Proton might shut down SimpleLogin since Proton Pass has its own alias feature.
By Xevion 2026-02-2820:38 This service is basically a nightmare to export/move away from. 30 minutes to switch to, maybe 30 hours to switch away from.
By rhdunn 2026-03-018:21 Now move all the services and accounts you have registered to that account, along with all the friends and family who have your old email account.
By akhilchaturvedi 2026-03-019:16 Google Takeout :)
By 8cvor6j844qw_d6 2026-02-2815:541 reply Same. I still have an old Gmail address that receives forgotten but still considered important emails from various services.
What's the playbook for migrating away in this situation?
By cube00 2026-02-2815:56 Companies need to allow you update your personal information including your email. It may need tickets to support but it's doable.
By getpvait12 2026-03-0110:21 [dead]
By getpvait12 2026-03-0110:20 [dead]
This has its own risk factors. If your domain renewal lapses due to credit card expiry or something and you fail to notice, it's catastrophic. This is just not realistic advice for the average person.
By sowbug 2026-02-2823:49 You can usually purchase 10 years up front. But then you should set a reminder for every 3 years or so to keep topping up, or else you'll forget how to even sign into the registrar.
You're right that having a vanity domain for your primary email address isn't for the faint of heart. There isn't any realistic advice for the average person because it's not for the average person.
By cyberax 2026-02-2823:25 Not really? You just jump in and fix the domain name. You have 75 days before a lapsed domain is released into general availability.
Sure, you'll likely miss some emails, but otherwise it's safe.
By rzerowan 2026-02-2817:16 There was a time back when we could get generic LoginWIth OAUTH butons along with the social media roster , allowing one to use whichever provider they wanted.
Current state of OIDC should be pretty much standard across most providers - it put it that devs need too make the push to support alt login providers for preventing vendor lockin in identity like were currently barreling towards in hardware/software.
This wasn't due to some random Gemini request. Users were using sketchy antigravity auth plugins to use their antigravity tokens on things like OpenClaw, clearly against ToS. It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
Yes, our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace, generosity and forebearance. How lucky we are to entrust our data and our lives to them!
Anyone can buy the tokens via the API and do whatever they want with them.
Its not evil of Google to say "Here is an allotment of steeply discounted tokens, but you can only use them with our services."
By GaryBluto 2026-02-2816:44 https://youtu.be/ntICHMV-WMA?t=40
"Google Shuts Down Gmail For Two Hours To Show Its Immense Power"
By mikkupikku 2026-03-0111:171 reply It's easy to sneer at huge corps getting mildly scammed by people stretching or breaking the rules. Certainly I don't shed any tears for these corporations.
On the other hand, I have learned that people who are willing to find exploits with trust-based systems operated by huge corps are very often willing to apply that same cheating and exploitation mentality without regard for who the other party is. These are very often the same people who try to coerce teenage cashiers at locally owned shops to accept expired coupons or combine them in invalid ways, or take produce from a roadside farm stand instead of paying into the honor jar. The mentality of cheating the system seems great when it's against huge inhumane corporations, but from what I've personally seen it rarely stops there, and on the whole it contributes to a low trust society.
By amiga386 2026-03-0216:27 What upsets me is less the fraudsters, though they are bad as you outline, but just the setup.
Google is in unilateral control of a whole pile of things. Some of them are more critical than others - in particular, if you use a GMail address or Google account to identify yourself to third parties, Google has you by the balls. It has billions of people by the balls. At any time, they could completely ruin your digital life. They don't even need a reason. If they lock you out, you have no way to get their actual attention, or to reverse their decision.
That's coercive power. The need of Google "customers" to keep in Google's good books because it can ruin their day at the flick of a switch is a massive boon for Google.
The power of scammers to defraud local shops pales into insignificance by comparison. And yet, we spend disproportionate amounts of time going after petty crooks, rather than directly addressing large corporations who wield enormous power to enrich themselves with little-to-no blowback. They can pay for the best lawyers on the planet to stretch out and thwart lawsuits and regulatory meetings. They are more powerful than us, and we need to reverse that - unless basically we give up and let them rule us with unchecked power?
A society where everyone feels helpless against a tyrannical ruler is bad, so os one where they can't trust their neighbours. I don't know if they're comparable but I'd prefer neither. I'd like thieves and scammers prosecuted, I'd also like large corporations regulated to within an inch of their lives.
By throwaway290 2026-03-014:28 > our masters once again embarrass us unworthy peons with their endless grace
Masters who serve you in exchange for money?
be as sarcastic as you want but you demand a thing they did not agree to provide, for the same money = they have a right not to serve you. If you disagree with that and think they owe you something then you are the one playing master here.
If a 3rd party product advertises compatibility with a Google service and you use it to login via a first party Google login page, doesn’t the responsibility fall somewhere between the offending product and Google itself? In practice it’s structured pretty much like a phishing attempt.
Notably some model providers explicitly allow that very flow, while others will ban you without notice.
If the "3rd party product" is you selfhosting FOSS, then that's you (OpenClaw users)
The concern is not losing access to some new IDE for operating outside the terms of service. The concern is when you lose access to the IDE, you also lose access to your 20 year old Gmail account.
A general problem for Google products is that everything is mixed together.
By BoredPositron 2026-02-2819:23 But that's not what happened.
By zarzavat 2026-02-2815:12 Okay but they were paying customers paying $$$ for the service. Banning your customers without prior warning is not right, however sketchy their behaviour might appear. Even if it's obvious to Google that there's a difference between a Gemini API key and an Antigravity API key, it's not necessarily obvious to others.
The correct and sane thing to do is to send them an email, with at most a 24 hour suspension. If they keep doing it despite being warned then by all means fire them.
It’s be great if Google just revoked antigravity access if terms were violated. No need to disable the entire account.
By LiamPowell 2026-02-2815:18 > just revoked antigravity access
That's exactly what they did, plus Gemini CLI and Code Assist, which are the same product in different formats.
I’ll go further: there should be laws addressing account consolidation. Getting banned from an Apple or Google account is an incredibly wide blast radius. It would be like being banned from buying Unilever or Nestle food from your grocery store.
By plagiarist 2026-02-2816:43 Email providers should be utilities and also legally require a warrant before disclosing any information whatsoever to the government.
Unfortunately the government is full of corrupt geriatrics who do not understand technology and are paid to continue not understanding technology as they sign bills prepared for them by ALEC.
By NewsaHackO 2026-02-2817:242 reply No Google account has been banned for this. People just keep spreading this lie because no one agrees that they have the right to steal the OAuth token.
It's their OAuth token, it's not being stolen. It's just being copied from one place on their computer to another. This is no different than a competing browser importing your localStorage and cookies from Chrome on first launch.
By joquarky 2026-02-2818:47 "steal" is semantically incorrect here.
By TGower 2026-02-2815:39 Only Antigravity and Gemini access was banned, not email or other google account stuff.
How do so many people think this happened? All of the articles I’ve read have been clear that it did not happen. Yet it’s all over the comments here. Why?
By DangitBobby 2026-03-0114:36 It's very easy to believe, and that's how Google bans usually go. Probably nothing more to it than that.
By jamesnorden 2026-02-2815:31 >It's great that Google is giving these users a second chance.
I hope this is sarcasm. A permaban as the first action is never a good idea.
By sneak 2026-02-2817:28 Telling your users they can't use certain software to access your HTTP API is exactly the same as telling people they can't use certain browsers to load https://google.com.
By NicuCalcea 2026-02-2815:171 reply When's the last time you read the ToS of a service you signed up for?
By sowbug 2026-02-2823:54 This would be a great job for an AI agent. Even better if a few million such agents collectively refused to agree to unconscionable terms.
By theturtletalks 2026-02-2821:57 They were banning people and those people couldn’t even cancel their subscription. That’s a rookie mistake and you expect the same company to have a flawless ban system?
By 982307932084 2026-02-2815:37 [dead]
By wnevets 2026-03-011:38 > Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account.
I would also avoid using the same credit card between accounts. I used a Venmo card for my chrome extension account as an extra layer of separation.
By jauntywundrkind 2026-02-2816:21 It's not 100% clear to me, but supposedly it was just access to Antigravity that was shut off.
If people lost access to their whole accounts that would be a major crisis for Google users. But it doesn't seem that that was actually the case.
This doesn't make it super clear, but, the submission from a week ago when bans got handed out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47115805
By jijji 2026-02-2816:04 yeah exactly have you ever tried to call Google support? it doesn't exist. the only way to contact Google is by posting something on news.ycombinator.com and then hoping that some person who works at that company actually responds to you and logs in somewhere and then changes your access.
By baby_souffle 2026-02-2820:42 > Way too risky to use Google services like this tied to your primary account
As a hedge, you can google.com/takeout on a monthly cadence.
At least a few years ago when raspberry pi nodes were cheap, you could set up rClone to sync the `TAKEOUT` folder of your gdrive account locally and then encrypt it and shove it into backblaze. Then set up a monthly reminder to quickly request a takeout and make sure that you choose the "deliver to google drive" option.
By HardCodedBias 2026-02-2815:391 reply AFAIK it has clearly been a ban of Gemini and not of all people's Google accounts.
However many stories appeared where people tried to claim that their whole Google account was banned to gain traction.
Unless it is clear that a full Google account has been banned we should push back on any story that claims this.
By nottorp 2026-02-2816:11 Why? Google has been doing automated bans for ages, even before "AI".
By now they lost any trace of goodwill they ever had and are guilty until proven innocent.
By joe_the_user 2026-02-2822:21 Using Gmail as your primary email has become a serious risk. Email was once a distinct thing but Google tying it to your everything-account makes gmail terrible.
By TacticalCoder 2026-02-2817:401 reply > The digital death sentence of losing access to your email
I agree that the digital death sentence is really bad and doubly so seen that many are using single-sign on tied to their Google identity but...
> with a company that notoriously has no way for the average human to contact a human is not worth the risk
There's definitely phone support for paying Google Workspace users: don't tell me there's not, my wife got Google support on the phone more than once and they've been helpful.
And it's not a crazy expensive subscription either.
This remains a problem for the personal account though (arguably what "primary account" meant in GP)
By aprentic 2026-02-2820:21 That's a big part of why I switched to paid email.
I'm the customer, not the product.
By rootnod3 2026-02-2819:55 Here’s an idea: run your digital life away from a corporate shitbucket like Google. Don’t run your email there. Plenty of good other options.
Over the past week,
A week? Try at least 16 days
https://discuss.ai.google.dev/t/account-restricted-without-w...
The danger here is they'll ban you with no specific reason, fill out the form and you get an automatic unban and then something else automatically flags and you're banned the second time permanently.
Support bot will then say "you were warned, read the TOS" and you get to guess what you did wrong.
You'll notice there are no appeals or reviews in this workflow.
Google has no creditability when it comes to handling account bans.
Ex googler here. It is based on Google’s fundamental disdain of customers. Googlers are repeatedly told by management that they are the smartest people in the world and that their time is too valuable to spend on silly things like helping customers.
I build AI for banks. A couple of weeks ago, I had a meeting with a Google team on Legacy Modernization using Agentic AI. Let me phrase it this way. None of them were smart. My team and I were shaking our heads at the low skills of the team. While this might have been true 20 years ago, I am sure there are pockets of smart people somewhere. But Google now employs 200K people worldwide. I am certain that it's hard to keep up the quality.
By StilesCrisis 2026-03-0113:57 You can't pass the Google hiring screen and be _dumb_. But I'm 100% willing to believe that they had no knowledge of your domain whatsoever, because the Google hiring screen is also totally generic and doesn't hire for any domain knowledge beyond "general comp sci."
But I bet you they still acted like they were the smartest people in the room, right? Charming isn’t it?
By charcircuit 2026-03-016:37 That has not been my experience working with Google employees at all.
By clickety_clack 2026-02-2815:321 reply People are crazy to use Google as the core of their online identity.
By elAhmo 2026-02-2820:29 Not crazy, it is just convenient. Constant pushes with Android, Chrome, random websites asking for Google login.
Google wasn't always like this, and moving of from an email address isn't technically hard, but something that 99% of the people will be very very reluctant to do.
By jijji 2026-02-2816:07 Google has zero customer service. using them for anything serious makes no business sense. the only thing that they're good for is serving ads to people, and they have a support team for that, but only if you're spending a lot of money, and even then good luck finding it
By jascha_eng 2026-02-2814:297 reply I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
What they are actually trying to force you to do is to pay for the tokens that you don't use in their applications to increase their revenue and/or give their in-house tools an "unfair" advantage. But this is bad for the consumer because it means that there is less competition between coding agents and unless I'm willing to pay per token I have to take one of the model labs agents.
Anticompetitive behaviour imo they could just ban reselling tokens or something like that instead of locking your subscription in like this.
>I still kinda wish that the subscriptions would just allow you to use the tokens however you wish. I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota. But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
Haha maybe that would reduce piracy.
The easiest way to watch a movie in the player of my choice - even if i have legal access to it because it's in my netflix subscription - is to download it off piratebay.
Add to that Netflix's shitty discovery system, I'm pretty sure I watched some downloaded movies in spite of actually having legal access to them.
Oh, remember when PC games used to come on disks? For the Netflix example I can only guess, but I'm 100% sure I downloaded isos for games I had actually bought and had the physical disc... somewhere.
By throawayonthe 2026-02-2817:10 i don't believe this is a significant driver of piracy tbh, normal people don't care about that kinda thing :P
especially considering most modern movie/tv piracy is free streaming websites - shitty quality and awkward player controls, definitely no choice of player here
This is almost as realistic as "I wish OpenAI supports using OpenCode with ChatGPT subscription account."
Oh, except they do[0].
By NewsaHackO 2026-02-2819:281 reply Yea, there are the last to the party (have they even arrived?), so they are going to have to make some concessions. I wonder if they at rollout will have a third-party subscription token service in addition to their first-party one.
> This is almost as realistic as "I wish netflix or youtube allowed me to use VLC to watch their content".
This is exactly what should be happening. There's no reason to limit the client apps for things like _paid_ Netflix or Youtube Premium.
Except you can't prevent people stealing the videos then. And as much as I don't like how things work right now, I think people have a right to get paid for stuff they make and Netflix is one way of doing that.
By cyberax 2026-03-022:07 "Stealing videos"?!? Are we back in 2005 again?
All the videos are _already_ available anyway, several minutes after they're available on Netflix. And on Youtube they are _literally_ free, with ads. People sign up for Netflix subscriptions to not bother with torrents and pirate forums, and for Youtube Premium to avoid ads.
That's why it makes no freaking sense to _not_ make your content available for paid subscribers using APIs.
Why is that unrealistic?
Think of it like the digital right-to-repair.
I pay for it, I get to use it with any client I want. Simple.
By verdverm 2026-03-011:19 Except that is a false equivalent, when you clicked "agree" you did so for their ToS to get a discount or bulk deal with strings attached. It's pretty easy these days to have a LLM extract the unique parts into a summary.
By plagiarist 2026-02-2816:511 reply I do wish that though. I have given up on streaming services, I am not paying for this bullshit experience. We used to have all the content unlimited on one service for like $10/mo. I can accept prices increasing with inflation but society should not accept such a backslide in service quality.
By ShroudedNight 2026-02-2823:17 I would take things somewhat further: I'd be happy to pay the equivalent of $20 2015 dollars for this service if it were comprehensive. Unfortunately, that might allow for a consumer surplus to occur in the viewing experience and the motion picture industry ties with maybe nVidia for peak pathological hostility to retail consumer surplus.
By NitpickLawyer 2026-02-2814:593 reply > I get that they rely on people not using all of their quota
They have no problem with users using their quota on their own software. Because they get the signals. They do have a problem with users using the API in 3rd party software, because they don't get the signals.
Well ... the clear signal is that people want to use Google's models but not Google products
By theblazehen 2026-02-2815:491 reply Most people have actually just been using Opus through antigravity
By xiphias2 2026-02-2817:48 I don't really understand this reasoning actually:
if OpenClaw usage go up, and a service (OpenAI it looks like) gets lots of usage data for personal assistent usage, they can optimize to make it better for people who get a $200 subscription just because of that use case.
By smashah 2026-02-2821:14 I turned off tracking on Antigravity. Do I deserve to get my account banned from a service I pay for now? Silly.
By Analemma_ 2026-02-2815:14 > But e.g. with open code it doesn't really matter if I use antigravity or gemini-cli the usage should be about the same.
This is not at all true. What is prompting this behavior from Google and Anthropic is that people are using their oauth creds/API keys to run OpenClaw bots that use orders of magnitude more tokens than the IDEs. The official clients also can use a lot more prompt caching because they have expected workflows.
And like, if you want to run OpenClaw, they’re not saying you can’t do that: use the API pricing, that’s what it’s for. But people are getting mad that they’re not allowed to roll their pickup truck up to the all-you-can-eat buffet table and fill it.
By bluecalm 2026-02-2819:10 I think the deal is quite clear: subscription for personal usage in their products, API token for everything else. You get a rebate for subscription because they get the data. I would be quite sad if they removed the subscription option just to not be "anticompetitive".
By agentifysh 2026-03-017:16 I wrote this as a work around to use my subscriptions for claude, chatgpt pro, grok from codex cli but seems like gemini is already broken and will require another approach after this
By notatoad 2026-03-014:05 Nobody is forcing you to pay for tokens you don’t use. If you only want to pay for the tokens you use, switch to api billing and pay for tokens at api rates.
If you want the discounted rates they offer in their monthly plans, then expect to follow the terms that discount is offered under.
