[gopkarthik]

> Late game capitalism applied to Google's portfolio would be catastrophic.

This is probably my biggest fear about the eventual fate of Google. The amount of data they have is staggering and would be very short-term profitable for PE firms looking to make a quick buck.

[coryrc]

How would they make more money off it than what Google is already doing?

[viraptor]

Google may not be a privacy champion, but they still have some rules. A PE company will do anything for more money if they're in the value extraction mode.

[onion2k]

By doing what Google is doing and also charging users to use services.

[NAHWheatCracker]

I honestly feel like that would be a good thing. It would push people towards alternatives and create competition.

If Gmail had a $5/10/20 per month fee, I would probably migrate to a more privacy/security focused provider.

I wouldn't pay much for YouTube, but video hosting is relatively easy and YouTube has degenerated so much that I'd like to watch content elsewhere.

I would pay for Kagi and ChatGPT each twice before I would pay the same amount for Google Search.

Good luck charging for Chrome and any of their developers tools.

I know there's a million services by Google and I would probably demean most of them and I'm not near the typical consumer. However, if the typical consumer at least had to consider whether to pay, there would be so much breathing room in many industries. Something as large as Google trying to explicitly monetize all those services could also tremendously change consumer attitudes towards being willing to pay for things thus making more businesses viable that do less of the shitty stuff that Google does. For a bit, there would be some bad will as people notice extra bills. It sucks that those extra fees would disproportionately affect the poor. The most likely case would be something like Google Prime with a monthly $15 or yearly $140, which I don't think is a gross value proposition for an individual of even low means.