There are stores in my area which sell, at a discount, overstock food products before they expire. It costs less stores less than simply wasting food, and people who aren't picky about what they buy are able to get quality food at a low price.
And to the employee point, overtime (and contractors) typically get paid more to fill gaps when demand exceeds supply. In some cases, when there is reduced demand, employees are offered furloughs. I recall during a recession when I was a child, my Dad spent about a month at home, but was still paid some fraction of his normal salary to stay on payroll.
Adjusting pricing to supply-and-demand isn't exactly crazy, freeloading, or communism. If co-lab were designed to generate a profit, the same type of pricing as AWS and GCP do would make sense. Since it seems designed to position Google in some position in the ML ecosystem, free makes sense.
As a footnote, I don't use co-lab. That's not because of pricing, but because in free offerings like these, I am the product. That's not always a bad deal, but it is for me for the type of work I do. I like running ML models locally (I have a pretty fancy GPU) using my employer's in-house cluster, or paying for AWS. I don't discourage others from using co-lab (that decision is specific to what I do).
I'm not sure why this discussion is so hostile, and reads so much false subtext into statements which shouldn't be controversial at all.
