I don't like seeing things tied to advertising revenue. It's not comfortable from a privacy perspective, and it's certainly not competitive for other players wanting to enter the space without the dollars from Google's huge advertising funnel/marketplace/ecosystem.
You'll notice Google also started to clamp down on Gmail trash storage space, and I'll bet they're going to place more limits on Drive and unused accounts.
I wonder if this is antitrust driven? Or are they hurting for space? We haven't seen this crop up on Youtube, where I bet they're really parched for disk space.
Will Google start deleting YouTube content that is super long tail and unviewed?
Well they added this to their ToS about a year ago:
> Terminations by YouTube for Service Changes
> YouTube may terminate your access, or your Google account’s access to all or part of the Service if YouTube believes, in its sole discretion, that provision of the Service to you is no longer commercially viable.
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21503851 for discussion)
Combine this with growing usage, this might make their projected costs much higher than expected
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-cost-per-gigabyte/
That reminds me I should back up my youtube channel, I probably have videos on there that I don't have locally.
For the business products there may be strong business rationale behind it (it would categorically rule out too many applications), but for a consumer product I doubt that they don’t try making money both ways.
Based on a cursory search, these bans are not so uncommon, and it is just scary
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24965432
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24791357
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23057365
[4] https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/5016170?hl=en
(edit for formatting)
If you have an existing free unlimited plan they should grandfather that in.
In a year they will start charging for gmail.
In two or three they will start charging for search.
They do. Photos uploaded before the change next year do not count.
I think this serves as a warning and reminder to users.
Wouldn't it be 'bait and switch' if they did that after less time, say 1 year? 10 years is more than reasonable. And if you disagree, that's fine, but I'm curious to hear what number of years would you consider reasonable then? I'm not excited about the news either but I think it's _fair_.
Apply that logic to other situations and it doesn't make sense. I get that `you` may be ok with this, but it doesn't change what it is.
Regardless of whether we individually feel what is happening is 'fair', we should be able to acknowledge why someone is upset and that this is indeed a bait & switch. Customers were offered unlimited backup and storage of the photos they took. Customers used said service with that expectation, while competitors to it went out of business, and now, they are forced to pay for continued service. That is a bait & switch.
The moment we have to start saying, "well, they should have known better" or "how did you expect this to be free forever" puts us into victim blaming territory. Just because someone could have been aware of a bait & switch/scam, doesn't make that practice not a bait & switch/scam.
'unlimited backup and storage of the photos' was the market pitch, whether people read the TOS is another thing. I can see why some people would feel unhappy with this and I can't blame anyone for that but on the other hand I wish we would stop taking these vague market statements at face value. 'free', 'unlimited' and 'forever' can never go together in a capitalist market. And I'll abruptly stop here because I would derail into things like law and ethics which, I think, are out of my scope.
> while competitors to it went out of business
This is honestly a tragedy that happens all across the industry at the moment.
You don't like it, you have the option to take your photos somewhere else.
Now the choice is to pay or walk away.
(source: i did it)
> In two or three they will start charging for search.
Great! They should.
I would pay for this now if as a result google started respecting privacy.
Charge me for it and then just focus on making the best product.
I like this change a lot.
I'm not happy to pay to be the product, or to have something I rely on swept out from under me.
Should I try it again?
I also might be confused, but I thought they kept some key parts proprietary. I'm now looking, and that doesn't seem to be the case. Perhaps something changed (perhaps even my memory!). I'm a lot more happy to pay for 100% open-source than 90% open-source. Is it fully open-source?
I'd love to pay for a reliable, hosted, open-source solution.
Google still collects data.
When it's in their interest to make it free - to drive usage or gather data to train AI, you pay with your data.
Once that data is no longer of any value they then make you pay with cash. Google Maps API, soon reCaptcha are other products that started out free.
Ever tried a search you may have done 5,10 years ago? Good luck finding obscure old stuff in Google's index even if it still exists - they just don't keep everything forever once it can't have advertising put against it.
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?!
That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.
What kind of entitlement is this?
Turn it the other way around... would you find it reasonable to be obliged to continue to share your data for as long as they provide you with free beer? Or can you withdraw from the agreement?
2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.
3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc.
4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential player in either sector.
https://traderiskguaranty.com/trgpeak/history-anti-dumping-c...
Or more properly, predatory pricing:
Most pictures taken today are probably taken with an Android camera. Google is, indeed, the most influential player in that sector.
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.
They’re pitching it as having “unlimited storage”....
Yep! We were right. Google Photos will launch today, for free.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/05/28/confirmed-google-will-laun...
HN discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9618965
Highlight comment:
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
-- XJOKOLAT https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9619340
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
A. $0 for the next 10 years. We've got really rich investors.
B. $X0,000, in line with the fair market price for a new vehicle.
The role of capital money is to cover capital expenses (duh), especially in the early stages, not to subsidize selling the product at a dumping price for a prolonged time period.
So while I agree this can be an issue in general, I'm not seeing the argument for it here. I think it would actually be relatively easy for a competitor to get started in this space.
Sure, it's not too bad but I need to migrate off a new platform literally 5 years of photos (+ face tagging), explain it to all my relatives, make them install another app.
Or I can just start paying 2$ per month. I'm not too bothered but it's a clear bait and switch.
To be fair I wasn't sure if this was coming or not given Google is not exactly a small business and could afford to spend some storage money to lock people in better in their ecosystem.
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.
>>It is political in the same way as everything is political.
>Yep. There it is. Flooding HN with politics to push an agenda.
No, it isn't. It's a descriptive statement. If you describe politics as "what we do together", which is the only definition that makes a discussion on Google's business practices (which is totally in the spirit of the website), then essentially everything is politics because of the effect discussing the world has on what should be done.
Anger could be due to:
1) Kill competition by offering product at a loss.
2) Once competition is dead and people are invested in the product and ecosystem, start charging.
It's getting tiresome to see multibillion revenue, tax offshoring companies backtracking on their customer promises. FTA:
As a side note, Pixel owners will still be able to upload high-quality (not original) photos for free after June 1st without those images counting against their cap. It’s not as good as the Pixel’s original deal of getting unlimited original quality, but it’s a small bonus for the few people who buy Google’s devices.
The level of snark in your comment is really unnecessary. There are many valid points in the comments on why we are upset but you’d rather just straw man us instead of acknowledging thosey or even leave the snark out and make your case.
This is not the usual "Google kills product", it's the type of thing that HN loves to say they would be happy to pay for ("Just give me something that does A B C and doesn't show me ads and I would be happy to pay for it!!!", well I guess until you are actually asked to pay for it).
Also, as a general rule, people should welcome big cos moving away from the "free shit" product model for two reasons—
[1] Self-serving reason: If the product is free, it's more likely to be killed if it doesn't get that much usage or gets a lot of usage and consumes resources but does not synergize with money-making parts of the company.
[2] Industry-serving reason: Big cos can keep offering free shit for way longer than any new player can afford to. Free shit from big cos is a major reason no smaller players can come up with potentially better offerings, because they will need to charge money to be a sustainable business, while big cos can cross-subsidize it. By moving to a paying model, the field is more level, and there is more of an opportunity for smaller players to come up with similar pricing but a better product.