If you're making $10 billion/quarter or year, products like Gmail are just loss leaders.
I could easily see myself having to pay $30 a month or more for all the services that are probably funded by spying on me, if they had to use a different business model.
It's fairly bad and unsustainable to build a business around trying to get people to argue more online, so they look at your ads to buy absolute crap they don't even want, but I'm not sure what the web would look like without it.
Would we still have all the random things like Google Street View that nobody would actually pay enough for as a discrete product?
Reputable news sources seem to have already changed from ads to paywalls, presumably because ads were making the sites look too much like tabloids.
I think this is the problem with big tech right now. We all know an email service doesn’t cost 30/month and generate hundred billion dollar companies with $300k programmer salaries. But adtech makes it so.
Plus there's Assistant, Calendar, Tile tracking(Already a few bucks a month for proactive reminders), Keep, YoLink's cloud, WiFi Camera clouds, etc.
Some of it could be done P2P(Especially Google Assistant which only has about 5 features people use), some things would probably disappear entirely in a privacy first world, and I'm guessing the rest would be an extra $10-$30 or so to.
The only goal of GDPR is to stop the theft of personal information, it doesn't dictate a business model.
Plus, the GDPR doesn't allow tracking as a precondition for using the service. Which is needed for the law to mean anything at all, otherwise all the big companies would require it and you'd be disadvantaged if you refuse, but it does change the business model.
It seems like an unsolvable problem, short of some kind of government funded subsidized open source equivalent of Google or something.
The real trouble is from even stronger laws than the GDPR that many individuals want. I'm not exactly sure what the wording of those imaginary laws would be, but a huge number of people did not want Amazon Sidewalk to happen, especially as opt-out, many want tile/AirTag to stop, some people want CCTV to be totally gone, etc.