> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

I’ll stop you here. Google offered it for free and, at the time, offered such an high amount of mail storage for free it sounded insane. At the time, my ISP gave me a 25MB or 50MB inbox and that was considered pretty decent, when Google was trying to get people in with 1-2GB.

They absolutely have a right to take ant steps they deem necessary to prevent malicious use of their product, and certainly aren’t obligated to provide it for free, but Google wasn’t forced to provide a free email service, much less one that went so far above and beyond their competition.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

What you mean for free? First, they have all the data they get from you. They now track you even when you are not using your phone. They can/could know if you are doing your number 2 regularly or not only.

They control how the internet moves. Https? Sure can enforce. Trackers, etags ? Why not.

They sell every single bit of information on you for a good price. And now they are even more friends with a very good orange buyer. They have a TOS on you that they can chop and sell you whenever they want and you can't complain.

What you mean for free? Maybe for you it seems free, but people are paying them premium for lots of stuff.

Google used to be admired by the innovation and good ideas that shaped the world to a better world. Now they are still shaping the world, but not for everyone

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Not even remotely true. They regularly shut down products and services with impunity. If Gmail cost more than the data they directly or indirectly mine and sell from their users, Gmail wouldn't exist either.

Gmail is not now nor has it ever been free. Everyone pays for it. To your point many people use it and for businesses to contact their customers they have to pay into whitelists for high volume delivery. The costs are passed onto the customers, including those that have never used Gmail. Companies that do not pay into such lists and that have many customers using gmail have to set up careful rate limits which means the emails will not be delivered the same day.

Email marketing and campaign companies pay into these lists and they pass that cost onto their customers as well.

There has never been a email provider that accepts mass email delivery to millions of recipients for free.

Their ecosystem netted them over $130 billion profit last year, I don't feel sorry for them at all...

Do you have any idea of how much they can datamine from an email service? Just making a special parser for amazon emails can give google a realtime insight on the ecommerce space.

This is their entire MO though; they offer a free product to build a customer base then they figure out how to get to know them biblically in an attempt to extract a profit and it doesn't matter how underhanded or unsavory it is.

Maybe at some point in the mists of time, someone just wanted to offer people a good email service but at this point it's a pattern of behavior across every Google consumer product so I can't give them the benefit of the doubt.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

No way they are doing it for free.

Basically they tied Gmail 1:1 to Android accounts. I have a Gmail mailbox for a few reasons: 1) self-squatting my usual handle, because they are a large email provider 2) it's my Android account and it's where I get documents shared on Drive 3) maybe it's the way I login to Google cloud but I don't remember. I used to have a customer with servers in there but it's long gone.

Anyway, gmail is their way to manage a part of the Android infrastructure and it seems they like running Android.

I don’t think it’s for free. There are ads in (free) Gmail, they harvest your data, and then the paid accounts are, well, paid.

I get the difficulty of fighting spam, just wanted to say that Gmail is probably making them money too. It's still free to make an account, which means they have to be careful who they give it to.

> But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain - and both a source of and recipient of endless waves of spam and scams. It's an endless pile of data to hold onto, FOREVER, as well.

They should let others do email. The more email service providers we have the better it is for everyone

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

You have a point, but if you've ever seen how a gmail account behaves for the ordinary person once it reaches 80-90% storage capacity used (15GB free, some cumulative total of all emails and google drive content, google photos content), all of these free services exist to sell a perpetual monthly recurring subscription to users. And many people do pay. The default gmail web interface starts to have a big banner across the top warning about storage reaching maximum capacity with a link to the payment page.

Look at the workflow for a standard out of box android phone now that defaults to backing up all your photos to 'the cloud', which will almost immediately fill the 15GB free. Once your 15GB is full, then you're run through the payment/checkout workflow to enter your card and set up monthly recurring billing for some premium google service.

In general having a gmail account is the initial stage in the pipeline of getting someone to be a monthly-paid google customer for life. Whether it's just for more storage to hold all their google drive and photo content, or google workspace individual, etc.

Additionally, tying a gmail account to the primary-user android on-device account on any android 4.x+ device means revenue from google play store paid app sales. And then all those 'free' apps that the user installs where the app developer has implemented embedded small ad banners for google's ad network? More venue.

Google isn't doing this out of kindness. Sure charging for mail would give some bad press but Google can handle it in many different ways and they have in the past. They provide the service because it's valuable to the business. They know that the void will be filled by another service. And that's bad for Google.

This comment somohow makes it look like google is a non-profit charity organisation.

Isn't it the corporation which makes super-profits and gmail is just part of the equation?

I highly doubt that anyone would ever riot over loss of access to email, nor that it's some critical piece of infrastructure, there are dozens of other communication methods online today.

You can't legitimately believe Google is a charity and maintains 'huge chunks of the internet' with nothing to show for it. Is it for free if they get non-monetary benefits? Like, my employer doesn't give me "free" money either; they get something out of the arrangement

the googles of the world are real-life analogs of lovecraftian gods, spending sympathy or defense on them is a category error. they do not know about you nor care about you, and would be just as happy dissolving you in their path as not.

> But it's expensive, complicated and time-consuming to maintain

But it's also a valuable pot of data honey you can boost your wonder AI with, so where is the plight?

> For free

And without revenue sharing

> have any kind of support.

Check, not having support is what Google is famous for

Google syphons all your email data and uses it for their very profitable ad targeting business. The cost of providing email service is miniscule, especially nowadays. Ad profits are at record highs. They've done their math for sure. Saying that they somehow got roped into subsidizing a public service is not even close to reality.

While I get your point, I can't think of a free email service that wouldn't also be a gate to other products. Whether it's Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail etc. you always get an "account" as well, something that connects other services from the provider in an easily accessible place where the user actually gets monetized. The email is there just to make sure the user comes back.

I pay upwards of 200/yr for storage, the free Gmail is a funnel to revenue for them and I reckon it’s very profitable

Free? They serve ads on their clients. The best solution that solved this terrible issue was Inbox, which they purchased and then destroyed. Google also makes monthly cloud storage fees for anyone who has large files or photos. Also, it keeps people in Googles ecosystem. It’s a beneficial monopoly for Google.

They charge for google workspace and many companies use workspace and expand on the services they use provided by workspace. The trojon was gmail and gmail interface / app on android and iphone.

The highest comment in the thread is somebody defending Google, a trillion dollar company that profits hundreds of billions of dollars per year, with a wide-ranging monopoly on tech services, as being a victim providing a free service for the public good. While stating that holding onto data is a liability. As though the data was not the point. As though the data was not the payment.

I need to get off of this fucking website.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

yeah ok, google maps is free, youtube also...

And you know why? Because every single one of their product is either a data harvesting tool or an ad delivery mechanism, sometimes both. Let's not pretend they do it for free, it's their entire business model lmao

I use proton, but it is not better than gmail. The user interface is explicitly inferior, and that is the main thing I care about.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

In exchange, Google gets to surveil half of the world's population, extract personal information from their email, and resell that information to governments and ad companies.

Gmail makes 10s of billions annually based on best estimates

They aren’t doing this for free

They could always just pause all new registrations for non-paying users. They set themselves up for this failure by merging YouTube into everything gmail and Google.

>They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

Just because they don't charge you directly, doesn’t matter it's not profitable for them.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

And now they have a treasure trove of AI training data, for free.

Google Ad's revenue per user is ~$50/year

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Google did it intentionally and pushed to make it happen. It killed whole lot of businesses who were selling email hosting in the process.

>They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free. If they ever shut it down the whole world would end up rioting because it's so widely used.

Google used to literally have a counter inside Gmail showing how your account had a super huge and always increasing amount of storage. The courted their current market position. This isnt "Oh how did we get here with our big bleeding hearts" its just enshittification.

>They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Not for free. Being monopoly is a huge reward. It isn't possible today to have a small email provider. While probably not having that intention from the start, Gmail played a huge role here as its existence allowed everybody to just ignore/block small providers.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.

> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.

Don't bullshit to us here, please.

Google scan billions people's emails (including very sensitive ones like medical record letters) to then show relevant ads AND sell the data to some partners (hundreds of them).

It's not called "public infra for free". It's the serious for-profit business. The surveillance capitalism on the march.

Why do people keep saying google is free ?

People pay for it dearly with their data for advertisement.

In fact, even when you _do_ pay, you still get ads!

>> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

They CHOSE to offer it for free so they could monopolise the market. They got roped into absolutely nothing.

You assume there will be no takers to replace Gmail, whereas there probably will be hundreds waiting to do it.

I am not sure the backslash would be big if Gmail said that a year from now you would have to pay $9.99 per month to use your Gmail ($12.99 ad-free). I mean people would complain, but would that actually give a backslash? Especially if they made it easy for people to move their account elsewhere? People are used to paying a lot more for things outside of tech.

I suspect what is really holding them back is the loss of data, and the loss of the assumption that ~everyone has a Google account that they are logged into, which means they can be traced around the web. Google also benefits from this, since its anti-bot tool will be more accurate and less fustrating to users.

Just watch when they squeezed everything out of the users they are going to slap a fee on them and tell them to fuck off otherwise. It's the same pattern repeated over and over with big tech.

> huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free

for free? I guess tracking you to death and shoving ads down your throat does not count as monetizing anymore then?

I have no issue with firms making money, and I am sympathetic to the people who work on these problems.

Not for one second, am I sympathetic to the firm, because it is simply a business acting on its incentives to minimize costs and maximize profits.

Google keeps it running because they make money off of it. Tech firms have profit margins unlike any prior industry; maybe feudal kings come close.

They make money off of it because they (like all tech) avoid investing in human heavy services like customer support / trust and safety. I have had google safety members vent about how they can’t get engineer attention. That when they do get it, engineers don’t want to help the moderators or the moderation software. Their incentives drive them to find a way to obviate the moderation process entirely.

People working to fix things and make it better for users are great. The firm? Heck no.

What a lame first comment. They're making tons of money. Sounds hard. Let's give up all our freedom.

They have gotten ROPED INTO? seriously?

The company that wilfully monopolised email somehow got involuntarily roped into running said email?

Do people love revising history like this?

You think goole is the victim here? Poor google, owning gmail.

You know, if it's such a bad deal they can stop owning it any time they want. They already lied about it - I was told I would never have to delete email, and turns out I had to.

I don't care either way, I moved to tuta last year.