alt Hacker News> 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
You're correct that it absolutely isn't free but the gall of Google to, once they have all the data, to turn around and demand additional payment for continuing to store all the data they sought out and that they've resold many times over - it's shameless greed at this point.
And it's isn't even like they're struggling with profitability, either. It'll be hilarious if this forces common folks to switch back to IMAP since once a user has been burned into spending the trivial cost to set up a local mailbox sync they're unlikely to go back into Google's arms (especially given how cheap (in money and time) disk space and cloud backups are these days).