Comment Re:google has no choice, like many others before t (Score 1) 128
Basically you have to pay them money in order to be allowed to do things that are already ethical, perhaps even legal to do. If you already can do these things, then you often have to put up lobbying efforts to make sure that you can continue doing them.
Paying for extortion is unethical and illegal too. Laws punish both the extorter and who omits to denounce.
For example, recall how after Google introduced gmail, California senator Liz Figueroa wanted to ban it.
Presumably she was afraid of the fact that the average Gmail user wouldn''t be aware that Google (and Google's unfaithful employees, and hackers, and the NSA,
In that case, it took some heavy lobbying in order to keep gmail legal.
You mean that Google overrode the people's sovereign will, that they had expressed democratically by electing Liz Figueroa, by corrupting other politicians? If so, it's highly immoral and Google deserves to be punished for this. The government has the monopoly of coercion in modern democracies, and this privilege stems from the fact that it represents the will of the people. Altering this fact is one of the most serious crimes that an entity can stain itself with.
Before gmail they used to suck horribly, the good ones gave you a whopping 10MB of storage
In 2005 my ISP gave me 300 MB of storage which, in a time of 56K modem dialup connections, was plenty. The free offer from the same provider was 100MB, which is still ten times bigger than 10MB.
and each action you took required an entire page reload, making them slow as fuck.
Did your webmail work like that? The one of my ISP looked like MS Outlook and wasn't bad. Why, AJAX was invented by Microsoft for that exact purpose.