Hi there,

Last week, Google announced that it will start charging small businesses that historically used its email service and other apps for free.

This was after a decade of free use.

Seemed pretty fair to me, tbh.

A decade of free is a long time.

But then I saw internet comments (never a good idea) and an article in the NYT that said some small business owners were mad about this cuz presumably they shouldn’t be charged.  

Draped in some “small businesses are the backbone of our communities” talk, the thought that a small business should pay for a service it uses seemed foreign to these “business” owners. 

Thinking this must be a small minority of folks, I conducted a highly scientific poll on LinkedIn and to my surprise, about ⅓ of respondents thought it was unfair. Of course, that means almost ⅔ said it was fair.  

Clearly, there was something I wasn’t getting and so this was a good opportunity to understand that.

When I asked people why Google should provide for free a service that presumably costs it money to deliver, there were a few reasoned, thoughtful responses and many histrionic ones (calls for anti-trust, claims Google is now evil or unethical, that this will be what breaks Google and gets people to leave it, etc.).

Some people said Google never said it would charge one day and that people probably assumed it’d be free forever. Remember that phrase about what happens when you assume?

There was also the argument that Google makes enough money. Or that it makes money by mining the emails. As a result, it shouldn’t need to charge small businesses.

What if we extended this argument to banks or internet service providers or credit card processors or utility providers or landlords and asked them to make their products & services free to small businesses because their companies all make enough money?

Wouldn’t that ultimately be the best thing for small businesses? 

Just not to pay for anything.

I love free isht as much as the next person and I remember growing up and seeing how hard my parents worked to keep the ice cream store they owned afloat. I also know the current zeitgeist is to hate on all things big tech, but small businesses — as the name implies — are businesses. If they think Google is now too expensive or now unsavory, it’s a free market and they can and should move elsewhere.  

WDYT? Is there a compelling reason for why Google should keep its email service free for small businesses?

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