In order to be completely fair, I have to grant (with some reservations) that Google eventually did the right thing, and reversed their blanket decision to drop the Legacy accounts. As it stands, Legacy accounts intended for personal use remain free from monthly fees. This was a sort of last minute decision, not published particularly transparently, and comes with some caveats.

The first restriction, and it’s something that I think many if not all personal users will accept, is that the accounts must only be for personal use. I know this will affect any number of small (and some not so small) businesses that have relied on the accounts for maybe ten or more years, but there’s an understandable rationale to charge for a service used in the chase for profit. How many of these businesses offer their own services for free? Yes, it will impact on some small, one or two-man, close to the edge, operations, but Google have effectively supported many larger organisations for years and have chosen to draw a mainly clear and inarguable line. Personal use – free, non-personal – you pay.

The second concern is a little less straightforward. Google have said they may withdraw some ‘business’ functionality, without clarifying what they mean by that. If you are at all paranoid (like me) then you start looking at the custom domain email service. Google would like nothing more than to have everyone using a gmail address, and there’s still the possibility that they’ll introduce a charge to retain the custom email domain later. We will face that when it happens, but to me this still smacks of a foot in the door towards making the Legacy accounts unviable.

In typical Google fashion the entire reversal remains fraught with problems. For many people the actual process to confirm their personal use failed (and seems to still be doing so – with many reporting that this option is no longer available now). They’ve also made a hash of reverting accounts for people who had, due to the pressure applied beforehand, already updated to a paid option. That should, in theory, be easy to fix, but no, there’s confusion over whether or not some accounts are free or whether they will be charged going forward. Then there’s the whole question of those who migrated, at financial and time cost, to other services. I think Google can forget tempting them back, given that there is no way of compensating for the effort wasted – but then perhaps Google prefers not to have to provide the free service any longer, and are looking to as future where they can say that demand has dropped and the provision is no longer needed…