[slantyyz]

> expect it to be free forever.

Where does it say he expected it to be free? In the article, there's a tweet that says "So I paid Google a lot of money for a long time for a plan that included unlimited storage"

To me, the bigger problem is that companies are allowed to offer "unlimited" anything in their marketing copy.

[Sanzig]

Yep, it's pretty clear that unlimited is going to have limits (250 TB is a lot of data, that'd be $1500 a month in Backblaze). However, Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited (eg: up to 10 TB), rather than leaving it as a nebulous ToS term they can arbitrarily decide upon in the future.

This is actually a good use case for something like AWS Deep Glacier or Azure Archive Storage: data that needs to be saved and accessed infrequently if at all. It'd be around $250/mo, but as a business expense for a professional journalist that seems reasonable. Amazon or Microsoft could of course turf those services in the future, but considering the number of large companies that use them for long-term archiving I would expect that there would be a lot of notice before taking that step.

[slantyyz]

> Google should have been required to be up front about their definition of unlimited

Well, unless the definition of unlimited is actually unlimited as in "no limits", you shouldn't be allowed to use the word in any marketing material.

If a company can go around saying "Unlimited means there's a limit", then that's just nuts.