Let me also be constructive and suggest ways in which Google could make this process fair.

First of all, don't make the process an digital on/off decision. Create a system of staged penalties leading up to account suspension and then, if abused, closure.

New accounts should have an "on-boarding" process in place.

It would be OK to tell the site that, for the first 30 days ads will be presented and NO revenue will be paid to the site. This is a monitoring period where Google can just watch and see how the site behaves.

During the following 90 days revenue is slowly notched up from 0% to 100%. Again, close monitoring and feedback during this period is critical.

If and when a problem occurs, Google is to provide clearly understandable data on the relevant violations and suggestions on fixing them.

One argument against this is that, if they made their violation detection data public, spammers will use the data to get even better. Well, so be it. Use this to develop even better detection technology. Last I heard Google is staffed with pretty smart folk. Solve the problem!

After clearly flagging the relevant problems give the account owner a reasonable length of time to fix it. Say, three days from receipt of the notice.

If the problem is not fixed in the alloted time then ad revenues start to be discounted based on some well-explained formula. Maybe 10% per day. This should provide enough incentive for a lazy site owner to take action.

This could also come with staged penalization of the site-standing in search. This could be controversial. Maybe not.

This could also have an element of a reduction of the CPM revenue on ads served into the site.

Once the revenue reaches zero ad placement stops. Perhaps there's the option for Google to serve non-ads with text noting that this site is in violation of AdSense rules. I can thing of few things that'll wake someone up more than having all of your ad locations populated with such a notice.

Despite all of the above, the account is never killed off except for the most egregious cases.

Having all ad revenue shut down the site is given a full report --with clear reasons-- of the violations and the timeline to ad-serving shutdown. AND, how to fix it.

The site could be suspended from AdSense for thirty days, during which they have to show that they fixed the problems.

Once the problems are fixed a staged restart of ad-serving would begin.

At first the site would start being served with a few ads and they'd only earn, say, 50% of normal revenue.

Over a period of three months of "good behavior" the sites ads would increase and improve. And, of course, the percentage of revenue earned per ad would notch back up to 100%.

Oh, yes, if the account holder owns multiple sites on one AdSense account the sites ought to be treated separately. If one site is having problems but there's another that is in perfect standing account actions should only affect the site that needs to fix problems and not the entire account.

I'm sure the above has holes. It is probably a reasonable start for a framework that could fix the problem.

I've had the experience of having legitimate and above-honest clients get banned from AdSense for, well, we'll never know. The problem with the way Google runs this is that there's no way to make an honest mistake. This is very easy to do when you are just getting started. It's not fair.