> the vast majority of people not in HN prefer free to paying 1 cent
Yes, I get that Google and Facebook and Twitter and friends have gotten people accustomed to having all these wonderful services that everyone loves to use somehow magically appear on the Internet for free. That doesn't mean it's actually free. It just means that the costs are hidden.
Which is all fine in and of itself: if everyone else wants to hand over their private data to be sold, sure, go ahead, do it. I don't even have a Twitter account, and while I have a Facebook account I almost never use it and have entered zero data beyond my name into its profile. I can't quite say the same about my Google account, since I do buy books and apps from Google Play, but it's as close as I can get it to zero data in its profile. So I at least have some way of limiting how much I am participating in the great selling of personal data.
However, I don't have a way of getting better service from Google for things that could be better services if those of us who want the better service were allowed to pay for it. That's one of the standard ways of doing price discrimination, and should be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with cloud services, or indeed anyone who has used an app with a freemium business model: service tiers. The lowest tier is the free one; the other tiers are progressively more expensive and provide more added functionality. But Google can't be bothered to do it for its hugely useful apps like Maps and search, and then they tell us how difficult it is to staff these hugely useful apps with enough engineering resources. It doesn't add up.
Yes, I get that Google and Facebook and Twitter and friends have gotten people accustomed to having all these wonderful services that everyone loves to use somehow magically appear on the Internet for free. That doesn't mean it's actually free. It just means that the costs are hidden.
Which is all fine in and of itself: if everyone else wants to hand over their private data to be sold, sure, go ahead, do it. I don't even have a Twitter account, and while I have a Facebook account I almost never use it and have entered zero data beyond my name into its profile. I can't quite say the same about my Google account, since I do buy books and apps from Google Play, but it's as close as I can get it to zero data in its profile. So I at least have some way of limiting how much I am participating in the great selling of personal data.
However, I don't have a way of getting better service from Google for things that could be better services if those of us who want the better service were allowed to pay for it. That's one of the standard ways of doing price discrimination, and should be very familiar to anyone who has dealt with cloud services, or indeed anyone who has used an app with a freemium business model: service tiers. The lowest tier is the free one; the other tiers are progressively more expensive and provide more added functionality. But Google can't be bothered to do it for its hugely useful apps like Maps and search, and then they tell us how difficult it is to staff these hugely useful apps with enough engineering resources. It doesn't add up.