And the price is what? Your browsing history? Personalized Ad's? Provided you don't AdBlock that is!
I like the symbiotic relationship. I do believe in safeguarding yourself from getting locked out of your life due to your Google acc getting banned but outside of that I see no harm in getting free service in exchange for data. It's a fair deal.
Regardless of what you think of using your private data in exchange for free services, the problem with the cloud owned by US companies is that to us outside the US it seems like any kind of blackmail now seems fair game.
Since Vance threatened to drop NATO support if the EU regulates Musk's platforms [1], temporarily holding hostage our data to 'win' a trade war does not seem that far-fetched anymore.
Also, if the US ends up trying to make good on their threat to annex Canada or Greenland, then we are strongly dependent on a hostile state. We learned some lessons from being dependent on Russian gas.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
IMO your quotation marks around _free_ do a lot of heavy lifting.
Not until we start considering all non-IPv6-supporting ISPs to be a no-go.
Cloud also has networked SSDs so they can keep the machines and partitions separate, which really limits their speed and throughput and increases latency. Nothing beats a PCIe attached NVMe.