A lot of adoption of Google services was driven by not having to worry about quotas. Making quotas a concern again will pave the way for people to start competing with them by offering cheaper storage in a way people have been unable to compete with them for years.
You can store a very reasonable amount of photos in 12GB. Gmail is still practically unlimited to most people.
Most of Googles products are also geared towards encouraging people to develop a habit of not deleting things, which creates a very different situation.
So while this may not be a big problem at the moment, we'll see. I see Photos suggest that at my current rate it'll last ~4 years before I'll need to start paying, which isn't awful, but it's a question of when not if, and image / video sizes still keep creeping up.
That's with my photo-taking being at a far lower rate than it used to be when my son was younger. I'm not a very social person and don't travel much at the moment - a lot of people will hit those limits far faster.
This is why google needs anti-trust.
Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
Not to totally take away from your point (and interesting story) which is still valid. Just a reminder of what we've gotten for 'free' for so long often is a consequence of other business models working in conjunction.
As a side-note, training people to pay for things is great news for privacy-mind folks though. Just as a behavioural thing, that's always a huge barrier to starting a business that doesn't rely on data or ads.
>Are they also going to have a lucrative ad business subsidizing the servers and staff?
You will need to setup redundancy if you use your own hardware, verify your client and server scripts, take care of encryption etc.
Also, syncing anyone from Dropbox to Onedrive can do. I like the photo tagging to be powerful when I am looking for old photos.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/11/01/google-rea...
Even if the house catches fire I can still get my stuff out of amazon.