Honestly this is pretty reasonable. Google Workspace for Education is a 100% free product which has always been an amazing deal for both public schools and private universities.<p>For something like 15 years it's been free unlimited storage for all faculty <i>and</i> students. Which means most of them are using it reasonably (e-mail and academic work), but I know people who would use it to store things like 10's or even 100's of TB's of video, just absolutely insane. Stuff that would cost $100's/mo. -- $1,000's/yr. -- anywhere else.<p>This policy isn't going to affect 99% of students or faculty. It's still <i>tons</i> of free storage for regular e-mails and documents. It's simply going to enforce the intended use for things like e-mails, assignments, and collaboration -- as opposed to personal movie libraries or storing 100's of hours of raw video footage without sorting through it first, just because you can.<p>I don't see this as a bait-and-switch at all. It's just maintaining the original intent, and removing the ability that allowed a very small number of people to abuse it as a free personal media library.
I hope the antitrust regulators are paying attention. When Gmail launched, the competitors' model was pay-for-storage, and Google's strategy was free storage for everyone. Now that the market is an oligopoly, Google is monetizing storage.
This suggests Google is putting 100TB as being enough for 20,000 users.<p>Thats an average of 5 Gigs/user.<p>I suspect nearly all schools and universities are within that today. Remember there will be a lot of people who barely use their Google account and just have a few text emails in it.
The incredible short-sightedness of everyone who reworked their business around subscription cloud business products that can change their terms and costs at any time.<p>Once schools and enterprises are locked in enough, the prices will rise, the offerings will diminish, and nobody will be able to do squat about it.<p>If subscription offerings were required to uphold their pricing and terms for customers as long as they maintained an account, you'd see very different calculations on what is offered when. Much more like an on-prem offering.