GoKawiilPublished September 14, 2026 · Warsaw New article When Google Cuts Off Access: Poland and the World. Before You Use Gmail to Sign In Anywhere, Read This and Think 10 Times ↩ Return to the case homepage
In brief: On September 1, 2026, Google disabled the Gmail inbox I had used for fifteen years. The reason: “spam,” without identifying a single message. That day I sent six complaints about Anthropic, the maker of Claude, to 107 recipients. I appealed five times, complained to three public authorities, went to Google’s offices, and sent three registered letters. Four companies stand behind the account, yet Google Poland is not a party to any agreement I have. Google’s servers in Poland are purchased by a company with five employees and no website. The bank resolved my dispute with Anthropic in eighteen days; in two weeks, Google did not identify a single message.
How to read this text 🔗 This article grew out of one question people ask when, overnight, they lose an inbox they have used since 2011: did I encounter one automated system’s mistake, or a way of doing business that can be documented through examples from Poland and around the world, one after another, with dates? The answer took two weeks and is set out below. I used only publicly available material that anyone can verify without asking anyone for a favour: judgments and court orders, official announcements, company-register extracts, financial statements, reports by ombudsmen and regulators, and press accounts of people who lost access to their own accounts. When a fact comes from an official document, judgment, or register, I state it directly. When I know it from an article, blog, or law firm’s account, I say so in the sentence. Not every case described here concerns a blocked account; some involve competition, data, or advertising. They are included because they show how Google deals with courts and regulators, which matters to anyone trying to get an answer from this company and hearing only an automated system in return. One more point about method. Several companies sharing an address or board members is a matter of public record. I draw no conclusions from that fact about anyone’s motives or the responsibility of any particular person. Readers are fully entitled to ask themselves why everything was arranged in precisely this way.
Six emails, one button 🔗 I am not a free user. I pay Google for business services, Workspace, and Cloud, and a Warsaw company within the group invoices me [18]. On September 1, 2026, between 15:49 and 15:53, I sent six messages from my private Gmail account to a total of 107 different addresses: 99 media addresses, four public authorities, two Anthropic addresses, and two private addresses. They were complaints about Anthropic, the maker of the Claude assistant and Claude Code tool, which had disabled services I paid for and answered my complaints with a bot. I sent them from Gmail because that was the address I used to log in to Claude, and Anthropic was copied on every message. That is why I did not use email on my own domain: otherwise their bots, which since April have passed my complaints back and forth dozens of times, would not know which account to associate the correspondence with. I did this deliberately because I know how these systems work. Google’s automated system classified those six emails as spam and disabled the inbox the same day. The list of messages and recipients is attached to the pre-litigation demand and sits in the evidence file on this website [evidence]. Five appeals produced five automated refusals, repeated word for word, without a single concrete detail and without a human signature. On September 9, I filed a formal request through the form Google provides under the EU Digital Services Act; the submission received a number, but no answer arrived. I later sent the same messages—the ones for which Google’s automated system called me a spammer—again from my business inbox on my own domain. No filter stopped them. Public authorities, companies, and individual newsrooms, including some outside Poland, are replying. People are replying, not a machine. The same text is correspondence to one email provider and a breach of rules to another, punishable by extinguishing a fifteen-year-old inbox. Can a complaint about one corporation cost you an account with another? If this is how they treat a paying business customer, how will they treat you? The inbox can neither receive nor send, while recovery codes and password resets from other services still go to that dead address. I counted: one account tied me to roughly a hundred services and logins [98]. The account formally remains alive and may yet disappear in its entirety; the terms allow all services to be suspended on the basis of a “reasonable suspicion of harm” [96]. Do you have Gmail? Then find out who has a hand on the switch and whom you will write to once they press it. In Poland, no one is responsible for this.
The hotline sends you to the office. The office sends you to the hotline. 🔗 On September 4, the complaint went to the Office of Electronic Communications; on September 5, to the Personal Data Protection Office; and on September 7, to the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection. On September 5, I sent Google a pre-litigation demand with a deadline of September 9 at 12:00. The deadline passed in silence. On September 9, I called Google’s helpline. The call is recorded. The consultant hears what the matter is and says: “Please write to the office in Warsaw.” A moment later he advises: “No, I would suggest that you contact them by ordinary post.” I say that, in that case, I will go there in person. He then says: “I understand, but I am unable to help you.” And finally: “You must send that question, send the question to the office, either in Warsaw or in Dublin.” That same day I went to Rondo Daszyńskiego 2C in Warsaw, the registered office of Google Poland, and this is worth pausing over. That address did not appear in Google Search; it showed an address on Emilii Plater Street and a telephone number that did not exist. I tried calling it: there was no such number. So I decided to take the papers there in person. In the lobby, contract security guards in red Google-branded shirts blocked my way. Nobody came down from the company, although all I asked was for the secretariat to accept the documents—personal service, standard practice at public offices and every private company. They refused fifty-two pages comprising letters, complaints to three authorities, and a pre-litigation demand. “You may not enter the premises,” the security guard told me. As for the documents: “I do not accept these documents.” He did, however, hand me a card with the helpline number: the same helpline that had sent me to this address a few hours earlier (the recording and transcript are held by the author; an anonymised version is available on the website: [evidence]). According to the company’s report, 2,348 people work in that building [5a]. Alphabet, the owner of the group, reports 190,820 employees in its annual report [5b]. Which one of them is responsible for a customer in Poland, when the helpline sends the customer to the building and the building sends the customer back to the helpline? On September 11, I sent three registered letters, each containing fifty-four pages: one to Dagmara Brzezińska, the new head of the Polish operation, whom I had also contacted twice through private LinkedIn messages; one to the management board of Google Poland; and one to Dublin. There has been no reply. The full chronology, with dates, times, and proof of posting, is available here: [google-track], [pisma-do-urzedow], [google-0909], [case-status]. The phone sent me to the address. The address sent me back to the phone. The loop closed in one day.
The bank could. Google couldn't. 🔗 For comparison, consider the other corporation in the same story. I submitted thirteen transactions used to pay Anthropic for services disabled without explanation to the bank as disputed charges. Anthropic contested the claims. The bank compared both sides’ evidence and found in my favour: decisions dated September 8, 9, 10, and 13, totalling PLN 735.86 and EUR 358.68 for twelve of the thirteen transactions; the dispute over the remainder continues [99]. The bank received the same documentation you can read on this website. I do not claim that this caused the outcome. I note the sequence, and it is worth thinking about. The bank needed eighteen days to read both sides’ evidence and issue reasoned decisions. In two weeks, Google did not identify a single message for which it disabled the inbox. One of these companies boasts at every turn about artificial intelligence that can read and understand. It is not the bank. Google has eclipsed Anthropic as my immediate problem, but I will return to Anthropic because not every matter involving that company has been resolved. The bank has now done almost everything Anthropic should have done, had it been willing to read its own correspondence. The bank did not tell me that the complaint was “being reviewed” and that it might reverse the refund if the other party disagreed. It compared the evidence and found in my favour.
Part one. Poland
Three companies at one address: which one are you supposed to write to? 🔗 Who exactly is “Google” in Poland? The sign above the entrance shouts one word. The court register gives a far more fragmented answer. Three companies are registered at Rondo Ignacego Daszyńskiego 2C: Google Poland sp. z o.o., Google Cloud Poland sp. z o.o., and Topaz Computing sp. z o.o. [1]. The shared address is simply a fact from the National Court Register and means nothing more by itself. Yet anyone who wants to write to “Google” must know the entities behind those companies and first guess which of the three should receive the letter. It took me two weeks to determine which Google company was my contracting party. A person with thirty years in IT, whose profession today is artificial intelligence, needed two weeks. How long would it take the average person? A rhetorical question. Google Poland sp. z o.o. has share capital of PLN 800,000. Its shareholders are Google International LLC, with eighteen shares worth a total of PLN 720,000, and Google LLC, with two shares worth PLN 80,000; the ownership chain leads to Alphabet Inc. in the United States [2]. According to the financial statements filed with the National Court Register, Google Poland’s revenue for 2025 was PLN 2.01 billion; a year earlier, according to the trade publication Press, it exceeded PLN 1.53 billion, with net profit of about PLN 128 million and corporate income tax of nearly PLN 38 million [3]. Even so, neither Google Poland nor Google Cloud Poland appears near the very top of the Ministry of Finance’s list of the largest corporate income tax payers for 2024, headed by banks, Orlen, and KGHM [4]. Someone here is better at counting than at answering letters. Google Cloud Poland sp. z o.o. has a capital of PLN 4 million. The only shareholder disclosed is the Irish-based Google Cloud EMEA Limited, with 3,999 of its 4,000 shares; one share has not been assigned to anyone in the registration data [5]. According to Bizraport, this entity's revenue for 2024 was about PLN 148 million with a net profit of 6.5 million [6]. Above the entire structure sits an Irish arrangement that must be described precisely, because precision determines where correspondence should be addressed. Raiden Unlimited Company, incorporated in Dublin in December 2006, is a subsidiary of Google Europe, Middle East and Africa Unlimited Company; the ultimate owner is Alphabet [16]. The same Google Europe, Middle East and Africa Unlimited Company is the sole shareholder of Google Ireland Limited, the entity identified as the other party to my email agreement [17].
Perfectly legal, which is the worst part 🔗 I found the answer to who my contracting party is in Google’s terms and corporate registers. It is worse than having no answer, because everything is perfectly in order. No Polish Google company is a party to my email agreement. Google Commerce Limited in Dublin sells me the consumer subscription [18b]. Google Payment Ireland Limited, also in Dublin, handles card payments as a licensed electronic money institution [18c]. Google Cloud Poland in Warsaw issues the business invoices for Workspace and Cloud because Polish tax accounting requires it; Google’s own support documentation explicitly calls this company the local billing entity [18d][18]. Yet under the terms, the other party to the email agreement—the account disabled on September 1—is Google Ireland Limited, Gordon House, Dublin [18a]. There is no Polish Google payments company: the National Court Register contains the three entities described here, and none has “Payment” in its name [18c]. One account, four companies. Each does exactly what it was created to do, and each is fully within the law. Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are arranged similarly. Nobody here breaks the law. And that is exactly why there is no one to go to. One empty chair remains in this puzzle. Google Poland, a company with PLN 2 billion in revenue and 2,348 employees, is not a party to anything that concerns me. It sells me nothing, bills me for nothing, invoices no consumer, and provides no service. It does not appear at all in the terms addressed to customers. So when security guards in red shirts refuse to accept a document and a registered letter goes unanswered, no obligation is breached, because Google Poland owes me none. From a Polish customer’s point of view, Google’s largest Polish operation is decoration. So why does it exist? This is not a mess. A mess looks different. This is a design: a customer in Poland is meant to write to Ireland, and the Irish company replies at an Irish company’s pace—if it replies at all. The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection has known this for years, because its proceedings concerning Polish consumers were brought against Google Ireland, not Google Poland [49]. The address at Rondo Daszyńskiego is for photographs. The address for formal correspondence is in Dublin. The fact that customers must work this out themselves from four sets of terms and three registers says everything about what a company so fond of invoking “transparency” means by that word in practice. An ordinary person without a taste for this kind of work gives up at this point. I understand. This is not my first dispute with a large company, and I do not intend to give up on this one.
A company with 105 million in capital, five employees and zero website 🔗 The third company at this address is the least recognisable and the easiest to overlook. Nobody has heard of it, so I checked the register. Topaz Computing sp. z o.o. was entered in the National Court Register on November 29, 2019. Share capital: PLN 105 million. Sole shareholder: Raiden Unlimited Company in Dublin; above it, Google Europe, Middle East and Africa; above that, Alphabet [7][16][17]. Principal activity: data processing and hosting [8]. The board consists of two people [9]. Valentine Anthony Bohan, Chief Financial Officer, is listed in the UK company register as the director of Google Payment Limited since February 2025 and Google UK Limited since November 2023, with the correspondence address of Gordon House on Barrow Street in Dublin, i.e. at the headquarters of Google Ireland [10]. Svilen Ivanov Karaivanov is Google's legal director in San Francisco [11]. Two gentlemen, one from Dublin, the other from San Francisco, run a company that the average Gmail user has never heard of, although it may be the one that keeps his data. There is no one in Poland on the board of this company. Google itself says what the company does. In archived Google Cloud Platform subcontractor lists from 2021, Topaz Computing appears under “Data Center Operations,” with an address at Emilii Plater 53 in Warsaw [12]. The entry appears continuously across seven verified versions of the list, from April 2025 to June 2026. It remains on the current list, last modified on August 20, 2026 and read on September 13: same category, same address, and a REGON number matching the register [13]. The next row, at the same address, lists Google Poland as a subcontractor for service maintenance and technical support. Topaz does not appear on the separate Google Workspace subcontractor lists [15]. So: servers. Now for the numbers from the financial statements the company itself files with the register [12a]. Topaz’s revenue in 2025: PLN 165.7 million, all from a single customer, Google Cloud EMEA in Ireland. A year earlier: PLN 135 million. Net profit for 2025: PLN 59 million. That year the company also bought PLN 104.6 million worth of equipment from companies in its own group. It signed a long-term energy contract whose future commitment was valued in the report at nearly PLN 588 million. Current corporate income tax reported for 2025: about PLN 380,000. All perfectly legal. That is roughly 0.6 percent of net profit and about 0.2 percent of revenue. How many people generate those PLN 165 million? Five. Headcount over successive years: five, six, five, three, five. Total payroll in 2025: PLN 1.6 million. Every annual report repeats the same formula: no material events, no research and development, no plans for change. A company with PLN 105 million in capital buys hundreds of millions’ worth of equipment and uses it to serve its own corporate group. Who physically operates those servers? Across six annual reports, the operator is not named once. And one more thing: this company does not exist on the internet. No website. No domain. No profile. It has never advertised a single job on any recruitment site. I began by checking roughly 120 queries across search engines, registers, company databases, forums, and archives. Outside registry entries and one energy contract, the result was zero. This is not a Polish exception. Google has companies like this in at least eleven countries: Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. The same pattern, with the same ultimate owner—Alphabet—most often through Raiden in Dublin [17a]. Google’s entire European infrastructure sits behind companies that do not even have websites. Why include this in an article about a blocked inbox? Because since September 1 I have been looking for a human being at Google. Google Poland will not let me in. Google Cloud Poland sends me invoices. Google Ireland is the other party to the agreement and says nothing. And the servers are purchased by a company with five employees whose board sits in Dublin and San Francisco. Google says nowhere where a Polish user’s data is stored or who is responsible for it. Perhaps Topaz should receive my complaint? I do not know. That is exactly the problem: nobody knows. It is time to find out. Five employees. PLN 105 million in capital. No website. I found everything described here in public registers over two weeks. Anyone can. The rest is in the case file and in further registers I am still working through.
... continue reading