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Comment by dontfiremepls | Hacker News Reader

We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged.

Velvet gloves dumping.

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So if someone gives you a free beer for a the foreseeable future they also owe you free beer for life?

What kind of entitlement is this?!

There is a certain segment of the population that believes exactly that. And they tend to get offended when you point out that it's unreasonable.

What if he only stops giving you free beer after all other breweries have closed shop?

But there are plenty of other breweries! Adobe hasn't closed shop, neither has Microsoft (OneDrive), Dropbox, iDrive, pCloud, or for that matter SmugMug, Flickr etc.

If they are trying to drive competitors out of business to form an illegal monopoly, then yes.

If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.

1. Loss leading is not dumping.

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.

Loss-leading to dissuade, discourage, weaken, or preempt market-based rivals is precisely dumping.

https://traderiskguaranty.com/trgpeak/history-anti-dumping-c...

Or more properly, predatory pricing:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_pricing

Read your own links please and FYI Google Drive/Storage was far from the first to offer free storage, not by a long shot. Dropbox and Microsoft were offering of free storage years before Google even launched Drive. Free hosting in the photo sharing space predates Photos/Picasa by literally decades and even in their specific form they were never without major competitors from the likes of FB/MS/Flickr/Photobucket/IG etc.

Irrelevant.

Yeah, and which of those services you mentioned directly integrate with the camera and gallery app that ships with every other phone?

Most pictures taken today are probably taken with an Android camera. Google is, indeed, the most influential player in that sector.

Apple iCloud

It's not entitlement to say that, if it would end like this, they never should have been giving away such vast amounts of free beer in the first place.

That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.

If you have an agreement with someone to give you a free beer for life, in exchange for your personal data, they should be allowed to back up? After already extracting all value for your data?

What kind of entitlement is this?

It was not a "free beer for life", but "free beer in exchange for personal data". They stop providing the beer, you stop providing the data (new photos). Seems fairly reasonable.

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?

> The service was promised for free…

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.

Launch announcement:

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

The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.

Techcruch, arguably an entity with some experience and credibility in assessing product and service offerings, noted both "unlimited" and "free" in describing Google Photos.

Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.

Techcrunch never claimed what you are claiming. Yes, at launch the service was both unlimited (in storage capacity—not duration) and free. They never said that state of affairs would last forever, and it would have been unreasonable for anyone to assume that it would.

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