> actually, I would pay to use most of Google's good services.

A lot of people say this. You already can pay for Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar, Photos, and YouTube. Are you paying for them?

Does paying for these products disable tracking and provide strong privacy controls?

For G Suite, "Google does not sell your data to third parties, there is no advertising in G Suite, and we never collect or use data from G Suite services for any advertising purposes."

Also "G Suite's compliance with ISO/IEC 27018:2014 affirms our commitment to international privacy and data protection standards. ISO 27018 guidelines include not using your data for advertising, ensuring that your data in G Suite services remains yours, providing you with tools to delete and export your data, protecting your information from third-party requests, and being transparent about where your data is stored."

https://gsuite.google.com/security

Oh, huh. I might have to look into paying for that then.

> You already can pay

Where 'you' is a minority subset of the Internet population.

I am in the UK and use Google Search and YouTube. The only way to pay is with my data.

How do I pay?

G Suite for Gmail, Docs, Drive, Calendar + phone support + other stuff: https://gsuite.google.com/pricing.html

Or, Drive storage by itself, which applies to most products with storage quotas such as Gmail and Photos: https://www.google.com/drive/pricing/

For YouTube, YouTube Red: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/6305537

Another interesting experiment in the willingness of users to pay to remove ads is Google Contributor: https://contributor.google.com/

To add to this, since I've started using GSuite for my personal account, I feel a hundred thousand times more comfortable with Google.

1. My Google identity is now my real email, the one tied to my real domain that I myself own. That's so much better. I can comfortably sign in/sign up with Google to other sites, have them tied to that email instead of my @gmail.com one.

2. I feel way more comfortable sharing every single detail of my life to Google. In fact, it turns what initially comes off as really creepy, into a useful life service because I'm now using things such as my map activity etc as a service I have a paid contract with Google for. And if I don't like it, I can hard disable the entire service.

3. I have access to a lot of stuff that regular free Google doesn't offer. Things such as undelete email/drive (which has been useful on a couple of accidental occasions), and, get this, support. Live chat and phone!

This is pretty good. I've been considering moving over to Apple for everything to avoid Google, but this offers a partial solution.

If only I could pay a monthly fee to include search and maps!

You would now, but what if they had cost money in the first place? Like, you wouldn't have got used to their services for free for years? This is something people often forget when they are saying "of course I would pay money".

The world would be a whole lot different place (not necessarily any better) if Google services cost money instead of gathering data and selling it forwards.

I already pay them $5 a month so I can use [email protected] for e-mail (I believe this also exempts my inbox from their ad-based data mining, but I could be wrong) I would gladly up that to $10 or $15 a month to extend that across all of Google's products (Youtube, Search, Maps etc.) and have advertising stripped from the whole thing and my "peronalization" data sandboxed so it doesn't get leaked to the "free" version.

The difference that I see between FB and Google is that I would trust Google to get that right. I would expect FB to say they sandboxed or protected my data and then have it turn out in court in ten years that they did no such thing...

can i just use "[email protected]" rather than some company name? I'd really just be paying for the knowledge that google isn't plowing through my data and sending it to 3rd parties. My company name is already associated with another host provider.

That is totally fair. My main point here was the users have to pay one way or the other. Either via more seeing more targeted ads, which sacrifices their privacy, or via real $$.

I think it's time a model will come up where you have an option to choose between an ad supported and paid version.

Take a keyword like "mesothelioma". Are you going to personally reimburse Google for the $100 that an advertiser would pay them for your click that they will lose by not showing you an ad with this keyword?

The average click is worth much less though. And the main idea of subscription based flat-priced services is that in average, you profit.

try 1 cent.

While most Google searches aren't that valuable, there are specific searches (mesothelioma might be one, but I've heard local bail bonds and injury lawers) that have cpc in the range of $50-100. There's articles about this floating around.