> The honest approach would be to either grandfather existing customers at the promised price point ($0)…
This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.
Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.
Expecting them to not only exempt you from paying for your previously uploaded photos, but to also allow you to continue to upload photos for free indefinitely seems unreasonable to me. That's not what I'd expect from being grandfathered in.
We are going to lawyer this, aren't we? The service was promised for free, not per photo storage. The expectation is that the service will continue to be free. From what you're saying, (most of) the future use of the service, which consists of uploading and storing new photos, will be charged.
But there are plenty of other breweries! Adobe hasn't closed shop, neither has Microsoft (OneDrive), Dropbox, iDrive, pCloud, or for that matter SmugMug, Flickr etc.
It's not entitlement to say that, if it would end like this, they never should have been giving away such vast amounts of free beer in the first place.
That's asking for less free stuff in the interest of preserving healthy competition in the long term.
If you have an agreement with someone to give you a free beer for life, in exchange for your personal data, they should be allowed to back up? After already extracting all value for your data?
It was not a "free beer for life", but "free beer in exchange for personal data". They stop providing the beer, you stop providing the data (new photos). Seems fairly reasonable.
Turn it the other way around... would you find it reasonable to be obliged to continue to share your data for as long as they provide you with free beer? Or can you withdraw from the agreement?
If someone gives people free beer while driving out competitors or preventing potential competitors form starting a business, then it's dumping. No company should be entitled to decimate competition using dirty strategies.
2. Plenty of competitors in the storage space are still thriving including Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive, Backblaze, Amazon Drive, Apple iCloud, etc.
3. There's even more more competition on the photo sharing side of things like Instagram, Flickr, SmugMug, 500px, imgur, imageshack, Facebook, 1x, photoblog, etc.
4. Photos isn't even the largest service nor Google the most influential player in either sector.
Read your own links please and FYI Google Drive/Storage was far from the first to offer free storage, not by a long shot. Dropbox and Microsoft were offering of free storage years before Google even launched Drive. Free hosting in the photo sharing space predates Photos/Picasa by literally decades and even in their specific form they were never without major competitors from the likes of FB/MS/Flickr/Photobucket/IG etc.
Please point out exactly where Google, or any of their competitors, ever promised that any of their free services would remain available—much less free—forever. Anyone who expected that was kidding themselves, especially given the history of high-profile services being shut down or significantly redesigned on a regular basis.
Right now, I have more faith in a specialist small company (e.g. Smugmug [disclaimer, no affiliation]) which charges for their product than Google who offer it for free ... and then, not ... and then ... repackaged ... and then ... RIP.
The "unlimited storage" in the pitch was obviously referring to uploaded photos not being counted against your storage quota, not a guarantee that this arrangement would continue indefinitely.
Techcruch, arguably an entity with some experience and credibility in assessing product and service offerings, noted both "unlimited" and "free" in describing Google Photos.
Which might be considered a presumptive public expectaction.
Techcrunch never claimed what you are claiming. Yes, at launch the service was both unlimited (in storage capacity—not duration) and free. They never said that state of affairs would last forever, and it would have been unreasonable for anyone to assume that it would.
This is exactly what they're doing. According to the announcement, photos uploaded in "high quality" (the previous free/unmetered tier) before June 1, 2021 will remain exempt from the storage quota. Only new photos uploaded after June 1, 2021 count against the quota. So not only are all the existing photos and videos grandfathered in, you even have seven whole months after the change was announced to upload new material which will also be grandfathered in.
Google is also very good about data migration; you can download all your photos and videos along with a wealth of other account data in reasonably open formats via Google Takeout and migrate it wherever you wish.