Aren’t they paying for storage and traffic independent of the availability of the service? So if 100,000 people uploaded 15 GB of encrypted backups to a free Gdrive, they pay for ~1.5 Petabyte of storage and traffic. I mean it’s probably not significant for Google but it should cause at least a little costs without bringing any value (as long as you upload encrypted or bullshit data).
The main downside I see would be the negative impact on the environment. My example above would lead to plenty of additional hard drives and electricity that’s just wasted for nothing.
Aren’t they paying for storage and traffic independent of the availability of the service? So if 100,000 people uploaded 15 GB of encrypted backups to a free Gdrive, they pay for ~1.5 Petabyte of storage and traffic. I mean it’s probably not significant for Google but it should cause at least a little costs without bringing any value (as long as you upload encrypted or bullshit data).
The main downside I see would be the negative impact on the environment. My example above would lead to plenty of additional hard drives and electricity that’s just wasted for nothing.