Google Adsense/Admob blocks you for life if you use it before you're 18

b) It's legal speak mentioning "you cannot create a new account" but it doesn't say you can't try to fix the problems about your existing account. The problem is there is nobody to reach for mistakes or downright violations from Google's side. It doesn't work to help people with good intentions realizing their errors.

c) It's not mentioning that you will forever be blocked because you misrepresented your age for whatever the reason (just an unaware click is enough).

If Google was actually serious in enforcing the policy, they would just check any detail that could trigger this user could be below 18 years of age. As you read here, they don't spend much of an effort to avoid this scenario. AI works just to block you, not to avoid your downfall.

d) I wonder Google informs kids this much before making money on free content they upload on Youtube. It's not hard to see this is one-sided exploitation in business sense.

So... pretty clear, yeah.

Fraud occurred here. Google just shuffling the shells might be aiding and abetting fraud.

(The law here isn't set up just to protect Google; nor is it set up to just protect the kid. It ties into broader societal protections against child exploitation and child labor. So Google runs the risk of tripping over criminal liability, in which case the end result is no longer in the hands of any of the immediate parties. Their policies are maximally paranoid to avoid that outcome).

That would depend on whose laws you were applying. In a lot of places, fraud requires a misrepresentation that's actually material to the transaction, and a court could come down on either side of the question of whether the user's age was material in the necessary way.

> Google opens themselves up to huge liability if they inadvertently do business with a minor, which is why they're so paranoid about the lock-out.

No, they really don't. They might open themselves up to limited liability if they let a minor do something that lost said minor money. They also might not be able to enforce some of the "take it or leave it" provisions of their terms against minors (of course, in a sane legal system they wouldn't be able to enforce those terms against anybody, but you don't see many if any sane legal systems).

But they do not open themselves up to "huge liability".

Nonetheless, they don't choose to take even those small risks. Mostly, I suspect, because the response wouldn't be automatable. Google hates anything that's not automatable, and vehemently resists manually fixing anything. That applies to interacting with adults, too, and to cases where you haven't even actually violated their policies, but the automation happens to be wrong, which happens all the time.

Which is why nobody of any age should be depending on Google.