[jstummbillig]

Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)?

I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.

It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.

[Frost1x]

It seems to me, markets have short term memory because markets are composed of people who also have short term memory. Bait and switch seems to be a quite effective market capture mechanism. Bait with something alluring at a loss, build momentum, then pull away once little could stop that momentum. Along the way, build in hurdles that make it difficult to transition away from the service through technical and other commitment hurdles.

Rinse repeat and as long as you have a decent product and enough capital to front-load the model and take initial loses, you seem to win everytime going forward. At this point, people even shun phrases like "vendor lock-in" like an external business dependency isn't a potential liability.

[dahfizz]

Such a law would basically make startups impossible. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I think the startup culture is pretty toxic. Just an interesting result.

[jjoonathan]

With one hand it would eliminate the opportunity to bait and switch, with the other it would extend a supply of users who weren't busy feasting on someone else's bait.

The real question is whether you could legislate and enforce such a law in a manner that couldn't be circumvented with simple accounting tricks.

[idiot900]

> But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that

Did the user agreement - or even the marketing - at the time this was offered stipulate that unlimited photo storage would continue forever? As a user I never interpreted it that way - there's no free lunch.

You can get your photos out onto your own hardware using Google Takeout easily enough.