[billybob]

>>>But then Comcast will come along and say, "Hey, here's a (mediocre) search and email service that we will bundle for 'free'!"<<<

I don't know about you, but I would pay for Gmail in a heartbeat. It's a great service. I can guarantee that Comcast would make something 1,000 times crappier and that I'd waste hundreds of hours of my life fighting with it.

In fact, I'd rather be paying for Gmail so that I'd be their customer and not their product. I'm happy that I pay for Pinboard because I know that it motivates them to please me and not someone else to whom they can sell my data. And I'm happy because my payment is an investment in the continued existence of a service I value.

You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market. But I don't think it's true.

[dpark]

The question is not what you or I would do, but what the general population would do. How many people consider gmail to be critical enough that they will pay for it?

> You're asserting that Gmail and Google search aren't valuable enough for people to pay for them. If that's true, they shouldn't exist in a free market.

The free market involves advertising. How much entertainment in paid for with advertising? Should none of that exist? Should, e.g., "How I Met Your Mother" be cancelled? I seriously doubt it would exist in an advertisement-free market.