So if they come tomorrow and say now in order to keep using your @gmail.com account you now have to pay $100 a month, that would be ok for you?

Of course they can do that too. But this is clearly screwing up people, as it is not easy to change a lifetime email address.

If they say I cannot store my photos anymore, that's fine. I can move them. Changing an email address is not an easy thing to do. Or losing all your Google play purchases.

But yeah, at the end of the day nobody is forced to do anything for free (despite nothing google offers being free, as they sell ads with my data) but this shows just how you cannot trust anything from Google.

Personally my solution to this will be to pay for iCloud and move everything over there. I had planned moving to iPhone for privacy reasons anyway, so this is just another nail on the coffin for using any Google service ever again.