> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)…

This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.

Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.

This seems like a fallacy. VC subsidies benefit consumers until they run out of money or raise prices. As long as the market remains free, there will be new entrants. The problem is regulation that keeps competitors out. In some cases Big Co. lobbies for this regulation, but often it is government that kills competition by attempting to tax said Big Co., or adds expensive compliance.

Google's "business" model has been in question for years now, I now am extra glad that I already downloaded all my data from Google, acquired my own domain and set up a nextcloud server. If I need more space, I buy another/larger hard drive, and never need to worry about data collection, services shutting down or prices changing.

No one ever hikes the prices up significantly after running at a big loss. What usually ends up happening is that loss making companies adopt a model where their shareholders are the actual customers that the business makes money from. The goal becomes to IPO and leave index funds and pension funds holding the bag and playing hot potato with it. In a perverse way it's kind of sustainable. Hate not the player, but the game.

I really hate that low value, reddit-style political comments like this are becoming more common on HN nowadays.