Free Google Meet sparks excitement and scepticism
The news that Google Meet will be free to all users from May, just after Facebook launched Messenger Rooms amid security concerns around Zoom, has had a mixed reception.
Google is opening up its Google Meet videoconferencing service to anybody who wants to use it, instead of just offering it to enterprise and education customers via G Suite. The announcement that it can be used for free follows the launch of Facebook Messenger Rooms, reported on Monday this week, and the news that Skype calls can now be joined without a sign-up or download requirement.
Since January, Google Meet’s peak daily usage has grown to thirty times its previous level. As of April, Meet is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. As of last week, Meet’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million.
Free users will be able to access Google Meet from the web, from apps, and from Google Mail and Calendar. Free meetings will be limited 100 participants for up to 60 minutes but this time limit won’t be enforced till 30 September. Free availability will be rolled out over the coming weeks, and people not able to create meetings at meet.google.com straight away can sign up to be notified when the service becomes available.
Google Meet only became Google Meet earlier this month and was previously called Hangouts Meet. Google says it has invested years in making Meet a secure and reliable solution that is trusted by schools, governments and enterprises around the world. Free users will now be able to enjoy simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions and layouts that adapt to preferences including an expanded tiled view.
For organisations that aren’t already G Suite customers, Google is also unveiling a set of G Suite Essentials services which will offer access to Meet’s more advanced features such as dial-in phone numbers, larger meetings and meeting recording. G Suite Essentials will also include Google Drive for easy and secure access to all of a team’s content, and Docs, Sheets and Slides for content creation and real-time collaboration. G Suite Essentials will also be free until 30 September.
The announcement that Google Meet will be free has attracted a great deal of attention among consumer technology websites. The Verge noted that the requirement that users be logged in to Google would help prevent Zoombombing antics. So too would the requirement that users not invited by the host through a calendar invite wait in a green room for approval.
“Those safety-focused caveats are Google’s way of differentiating its Meet product from Zoom, which has had a meteoric rise that over the past few months and caught both Google and Microsoft flat-footed,” the publication said. “The increased attention on Zoom revealed a litany of security problems, which the fast-growing company has scrambled to address. But Google is seemingly hoping there’s still an opening for people who distrust Zoom.”
But Google’s renaming of Hangouts Meet to Google Meet and renaming of Hangouts Chat to Google Chat was evidence of a “fractured and convoluted history” of Google messaging and video apps that created its own trust issues.
VC news publication VentureBeat wrote: “In the age of coronavirus, it’s not surprising that workers are increasingly using video conferencing tools. What caught tech companies off guard, however, is that people would also use their work video chat tools for fun. Zoom started as an enterprise tool, even if it’s now also being used to broadcast yoga classes, happy hours, and dinner parties. Zoom traded privacy and security to make joining video meetings with hundreds of participants dead simple. As a result, Zoom is now the undisputable leader, and tech giants are trying to catch up. Last month, Skype started letting users join video meetings without having to sign up or download anything. Last week, Facebook launched Messenger Rooms. And Google has been flexing Meet’s muscles all month.”
Ars Technica was somewhat sceptical about Google Meet’s chance of riding the consumer wave of interest in videoconferencing apps. “The work-from-home trend started two months ago when Google Meet was still locked behind the G Suite paywall,” the publication writes. “Zoom was ready and burst into the public consciousness as a result. By now, it seems like most of the people who were going to transition to a video chat app have already done so, and they picked Zoom.
“Google doesn’t have a strong argument for why someone would switch from Zoom, either. Google alludes to better security in its blog post, but neither Zoom nor Google Meet is end-to-end encrypted. Both are only ‘encrypted in transit’, which anyone who uses an HTTPS connection can claim. Your conversation might be private from the wider Internet, but it’s possible that the service provider can view your meeting data. Participating in a meeting also requires a Google account, while Zoom makes it possible to join a meeting without any account at all. Zoom can secure a meeting with only a password, giving it a much lower barrier to entry.”
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Posted: 8th May 2020