It's not but it is free to use.

No it’s not. You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial via agreeing to a contract with Google. Just because something costs zero dollars doesn’t mean it’s free.

You also give up your identity; you cannot make a Google account from a VPN without providing a non-voip mobile number. Privacy has value too.

I'm sorry, I should have used more explicit terms: "free of monetary charge" is what I meant. Nothing can be free in this world. For some people not paying money for something but getting their privacy invaded is an acceptable tradeoff.

Google should allow this free tier where your privacy is invaded and monetized or a paid tier where your privacy is intact but you pay money for that.

> Nothing can be free in this world.

All the permissively licensed works posted on the Internet, especially those in the public domain, speaks otherwise.

It's up to you to decide whether you want to trade your legal rights to "free of monetary charge" services, but please don't paint all the other "free with no strings attached" things with the same brush.

But the Microsoft's online office also has a free tier, so how do you count that as a win for Google?

Because Google was first. Microsoft online office came a lot later and was crap in the beginning (not sure what is the state of it now).

"You have to give up your civil right to a jury trial"

this is absolutely illegal in europe... and probably in the US as well.

Arbitration clauses have been upheld regularly in the United States.

this is shameful. no private contract should be superior to the law.

Quite the opposite. No government should be able to overrule your own consensual interactions by threatening to use violence against you to countermand your own choices.

I must have missed this and I’m genuinely curious how this works.

How does it work with, say, a SaaS company? Does every employee and contractor retain a perpetual license to each line of code they wrote? If that company ever looks to sell, what intellectual property does the company actually have?

In practice, it works the same.

Technically, there are two kinds of copyright - I'll translate loosely from the Czech law, I'm not sure about the exact English equivalent. There are "person" rights and "property" rights. You can never rescind your "person rights". But that only means that no one can claim you're not the original author. That's about it. You can transfer "property rights" via licensing as you wish. The license can be exclusive and you can give a right to further transfer or sublicense the work to the licensee.

Also, each work is copyrighted by default. You're not allowed to use something that you just found on the internet if you're not granted a license.