What I said about video sites applies equally well to email. You don't even have to host your own; just choose a provider you trust. (If you disabuse yourself of the attitude that you shouldn't have to pay for email, there are more decent options than I could possibly hope to count.)
The "dependence" on Google for hosting videos and email accounts is entirely self-imposed. Honestly, if you want to fight Google's "monopoly", the only effective way is to point out the obvious fact that there are perfectly good alternatives.
First, gmail then tends to screw you on deliverability for using an unknown source - and since everyone else uses gmail, you're still at Google's mercy when trying to communicate.
And second... that's our solution? Anyone who isn't capable of hosting their own email doesn't get to trust their access to their records? At a certain point we need to acknowledge that the company-centric structure is going to define tech for 98% of people, and that this will affect even the 2% who can step outside those bounds.
I'd feel better about Google if they offered a hard guarantee that any takedown would be done with notice to allow file recovery, and offered an easy, useful "export all my crap" feature for all users, takedown or not. (I'm aware that the recovery window is probably illegal at the moment.) I'd also like things better if they shelled out on some actual human reviewers and offered real support when they screw up.
What I actually want in the long run is for someone to offer decentralized, private hosting, or else build a tool to make self-hosting comparably easy to getting other email. As a stopgap, encrypted hosting would stop this sort of intrusion, but again hits legal takedown issues. "Click some buttons, pay $30, get privately-hosted email with no overseer" is my ideal endgame here.
You can't really maintain a local copy of a "control of @gmail.com" domain to be able for people to continue sending you messages.