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***** Major YouTube price increases, and predictions about Google's future *****

A bunch of non-U.S. countries are now seeing major increases in the costs of #YouTube Premium individual and family plans. You'll recall the U.S. had similar increases relatively recently.

Prediction: #Google will start charging everyone for Gmail, Google Voice, and other basic Google services (perhaps even versions of Search), or force users to accept decreases in service quality (e.g., massive increases in ads) to avoid paying those fees (or to pay lower fees). These are services where many millions of users would find moving to alternatives extremely disruptive, and Sundar could likely pull the switch at any time.

Ultimately, it's clear that Google just wants to be as close to 100% AI as possible, with as few employees or bothersome "low value" users as possible, while still growing the profit funnel to the C-suite.