I encountered such a problem accessing Google Drive content via the direct link.
NICE WAY: With the code below it worked again:
//Any google url. Thsi example is fake for Google Drive direct link.
$url = "https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0BxQKKJYjuNElbFBNUlBndmVHHAj";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_AUTOREFERER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 3);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
$html = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
echo $html;
I tested it today, 03/19/2018
WRONG WAY: After calling file_get_contents returned 302 Moved temporarily
//Any google url. Thsi example is fake for Google Drive direct link.
$url = "https://drive.google.com/uc?id=0BxQKKJYjuNElbFBNUlBndmVHHAj";
$html = file_get_contents($url);
echo $html; //print none because error 302.