The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0) possibly at a loss, or shut it down and offer a one-click migrate-my-data button and empower customers to shop around for the price / quality tradeoff they are willing to pay for. Of course, that will never happen, because antitrust in this country is toothless, paid for by the exact same corporations that engage in anti-competitive behavior.
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.
Being grandfathered into a service means you get to keep using it the way you did, full stop.
This service is about uploading and downloading files. All they're preserving is the ability to download them, not upload.
Velvet gloves dumping.
What kind of entitlement is this?!
Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.
B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.
The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.
So while I agree this can be an issue in general, I'm not seeing the argument for it here. I think it would actually be relatively easy for a competitor to get started in this space.
What I said was it's a fallacy re: your statement, "SV's dirty secret is that it's an enormous dumping scheme: .... to gain a dominant position in the market... then jack up the prices and fleece the customers."
Consider there is also a capital cost to rapidly accelerating change in consumer behaviour, e.g. app-based ride-hailing, which can also open up new markets.
*edit: typo
I have also considered looking into mirroring my data on a trusted hosting provider for some day when I can afford to pay.
It is political in the same way as everything is political.
Not surprising considering you just came to HN last year, probably from reddit, bringing the same toxic discussion style.
>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
