If you really want to break up Google, people are going to have to get used to paying for a ton of other services.

I’m not saying this is wrong, but it will come as a shock to many people when they have to start paying for email again (or start seeing ads in gmail again).

However, it shouldn't be a corporate product. It should be a public service, paid for by the taxes everyone already pays and regulated to ensure privacy abuse and productizing of the user base doesn't happen.

This is how things used to be done - when a new technology became important enough to society, it became part of the national infrastructure, everyone was guaranteed access and no one was allowed to profit off of it. That's how the original telephone network came to be in the US.

Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.

Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city? That's not punishment, that's behavior control. Maybe the parking ticket wasn't fair, or maybe it was someone else with the same name as you, or maybe you had a legal, legitimate reason for parking there.

The US government is required by law to treat people fairly and protect them (to some extent). More importantly, public services are (in theory) controlled by the people they benefit.

Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.

The US government is far, far behind where it should be as regards updating laws and services for the computer age. It's time to clean out the dusty, old computer illiterate career politicians and replace them with technically adept younger people.

No, that would lead to even worse abuses.

Cf the present day Hong Kong protests, and Yellow Vests protests - in both cases, the government would use snooping power to spy on the communications, dragnet style. Anybody seriously suspected of partaking would have the account shut down. Since the account would be "the official one", that would most probably render them unable to access other major services, like banking, judiciary, or healthcare records.

Having a corporate steward of email is one more level of indirection. While imperfect, the corporations do put up at least a bit of resistance against governmental over-reach. Even just the fact of having to create, send & monitor official correspondence to demand snooping & take-downs is slowing down the snooping a bit.

Moreover, it would be highly probable the government would mandate a "real name" policy, or otherwise tie the email service to your offline identity. Cue the abusers by online platforms like Facebook & other advertisers.

Lastly, it's more feasible to compete with corporate services than with tax-paid services. And it's competition that drives innovation, quality increase, and cost reduction.

Secrecy of correspondence is one of the basic constitutional rights in many countries. And also there is a public postal service almost everywhere.

Any example you could name would be highly contested as to validity of the claim.

Specifically, "elected by the people" doesn't grant any immunity by and of itself; you would need a huge public protest or other such expression of public will. You may still be ignored by the media, which prevents you from getting anything done[0]. On the other hand, "strong legal immunity from demands of the executive branch" would take a constitutional amendment; anything less can be rescinded with a simple majority vote or a judicial decision.

>But this doesn't mean that private, feudal and corporate power is the only other option.

You would need to create a very strong legal shield around such institution. Right now the government (particularly the judiciary branch) considers every private contract to be in its purview, with ability & willingness to void, add, or rewrite any and all clauses it considers wrong. Even institutions like marriage are subject to retroactive change of the original terms&conditions. Even the media, with its oversized influence through gatekeeping the political parties & candidates, is still bound by various regulations regarding falsehoods, besmirchment, etc., while at the same time tied intimately to their insider sources. About the only exceptions I can think of is the internal dealings of the churches, and the diplomatic matters [1].

On the other hand, any NGO is subject to the wishes of whoever finances it. Whether it is public donations or corporate sponsorship (or outright corporate structure); whoever holds the spigot of the money gets a say. Another important say is held by the media; with ability to either prop up or sink any NGO or public figure.

As of recent, the social media mobs seem to be gaining the gatekeeping ability just as well.

--

[0] quick examples of media keeping mostly quiet: weekly Yellow Vests protests, Paris, France, 45+ weeks; annual March for Life, Washington DC, US, 45 years.

[1] bit of a stretch, but also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...

I'd say if you are an institution established by public law, you don't need expression of public will for your normal operation. Or you need it to control you, not to affirm you. You just exercise your legal powers.

But I agree that my comment was abstract, and by the pervasive conflation I mean not only in common perception, but also in practice. What I have in mind as positive example is Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", or perhaps Switzerland as states deeply amalgamated with their populations. Anyway, if someone is strongly pro-government or pro-corporate, it's in their interest to present those as binary options. I think this should be opposed in principle, whenever possible, even if the present state of Western democracies is not that great.

The USG has been working quite diligently on that already. I don't think there's any particular reason to believe it can't read (almost?) any email it wants to. Very few emails are encrypted and host-to-host encryption is optional anyway. Various providers that have tried to resist USG secret warrants have just given up because it's not really possible.

Big email providers already do that.

It's exception, not rule. Even if they want you to give name, it's not something available for others if they only have e-mail address (unless address contains name).

In the UK I don't think it's possible to get a credit/debit card without giving up name & address that are backed by ID.

Gmail, IIRC, requires a phone number, which again is tied to your payment account (if you buy it in the UK). Though you could buy a stolen pre-paid SIM, so it's possible if you're not bothered about being legal.

In USA I understand you have pre-pay credit cards you can buy in a shop, in the UK you have to register those (using a phone number IIRC, thus tying it to a supposed real identity) and they're really expensive.

Even with custom domain, there are some mail providers that accept Bitcoin. See here: https://www.privacytools.io/providers/email/

And, once more: my previous point was that even if providers know your id, it is not public. There is no service you can use to ask what is name of e-mail address owner (I'm ignoring "whois", which is domain-specific, not mail).

I just would not use it for everything (not for criticizing the West; for that you could use a Chinese or Russian e-mail service). They can already snoop all the metadata anyway.

This is flat out wrong. AT&T made A LOT of money off this.

And to add to that public telephone service couldn't exist without a heavy public infrastructure investment in telephone lines, and continued support of that infrastructure.

The costs of supporting an email service are probably not great enough that government intervention is necessary.

Everyone with internet access already has free access to email and to any of several basic web based email services [1], but, to get that free access the owner has to be willing to host their own email server on their own infrastructure.

Email (as in SMTP email) is one of the original free and open protocols of the internet. No one is required to have 'google' to have email, although a lot of people prefer to 'let someone else handle the plumbing', which is ok if they understand the ramifications of that choice.

Note -- I am deliberately ignoring the sad fact that SPAM has made 'running their own server' much more difficult than it used to be for many. But a lot of that difficulty stems directly from allowing a single giant corporation to hoover up too much of the service, such that the single giant corporation has gotten big enough to start dictating terms to everyone else who is not part of their system.

[1] some examples (note: just found these via a search, no suggestion of good/bad is being made, just the availability for free):

    http://squirrelmail.org/
    https://roundcube.net/
    https://www.zimbra.com/

This link: https://www.jotform.com/blog/10-ajax-webmail-clients/ lists ten (some overlap with items above).

IMO it's really not a workable option, the administration is time-costly too.

But what would this take? If there were municipality-owned servers that allowed for basic email how could abuse be prevented? Make it an open source project with public inspection allowed to prevent abusive manipulation of data? E2E throughout the system? What would this take? Someone has to have thought about it before.

Better would be a standardized, secure public service to store and retrieve data on top of which any protocol could be built.

Once people own and control their service data, lots of things will become decoupled.

Sounds like a good idea. Do you know if any public entity has made an attempt at this space? I don't even know how to begin a search for this kind of work let alone if it exists.

The USPS or some similar highly-regulated corporation could easily provide basic email, banking, etc.

That, or we should start regulating email providers since it's no longer rocket science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

Don't forget to include veterans benefits

Don't forget to include veterans benefits

and run without a profit motive

What if you could get a free email account through your internet service provider... oh wait.

Instead, maybe an extension of existing mail protocols to allow for updating address information would be better - for instance, mailing a deactivated address would give a special response announcing the change in address, so that information stored about addresses can be updated without user intervention.

Any thoughts on this?

Something like Gmail... I'm not sure if you mean by this; a multi-billion dollar tech stack built by the leading internet company in the world, securing exabytes of data for its customers with redundant backup, provided in hundreds of countries (and languages?), hosted across dozens of data centers, offering easy access through native apps on every dominant platform, with 5-nine availability,...

> [E]veryone should have free access to a basic web based email service.

There are two issues here, first is internet access and second is services available via the internet.

I think it is a great ideal to state that everyone in the world should have the ability access to the Internet in some form, with the ability to benefit from the online learning and communications tools it provides. Governments should use tools like spectrum licensing, and eminent domain to promote fair and equitable infrastructure deployments which provide reliable high speed access at reasonable prices to their entire population.

I disagree that government should outright purchase internet access for its citizens. The market for internet access is fairly anti-competitive already, government subsidies for specific levels of access work out poorly in practice, and tend to provide substandard service at above-market prices. This means the taxpayer loses and the citizen getting subsidized access loses. It works out better in theory and in practice to ensure your population has good paying jobs and can decide how they want to spend that money, including, whether they spend it on phones or laptops with LTE or wired internet access, which service provider they use, etc.

As to "free access to a basic web based email service" -- and to be sure, there's nothing "basic" about Gmail at all -- the amazing thing is that there are already a plethora of choices that netizens can make when setting up an email account, and many good free choices. Each of these free choices are usually subsidized either by paying customers of a premium offering, advertisements services with the email, or other services that the company offers.

What's great about this model is that companies are competing to provide the best possible email interface, at the lowest possible infrastructure costs to them, and attempting to offer such a great experience that they can ultimately convert those users into more frequent [paying] customers.

Practically everything about this model breaks down when you try to have "the government" provide the service.

> Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.

Gmail and other private services paved the way by spending their hard-earned R&D dollars to innovate and invent new delivery models for these services. To be sure, this was a public/private partnership at the most foundational level (ARPANET) and it has grown to be perhaps the crowning example of what private industry properly supported by government research and hands-off regulatory approach can achieve.

> Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city?

That unpaid parking ticket will mean, in many jurisdictions, that you cannot renew your registration or your license, which means the day will come when you cannot legally drive. That's the thing with State control of critical services; the day always comes when they will use a big stick to make you comply with their demands, or they will take those services away.

Private communication infrastructure must never be directly provided by the government, most especially. I'm sure you've heard of PRISM, or how a secret court allowed the government to vacuum up call meta-data for basically everyone in the United States for a period of time. Maybe you've heard of "reverse warrants" where the government pulls geo-location data from phones of everyone in an area that a crime was committed to create a list of suspects. Just this week the Courts rules [again] that government has trampled on the Constitution in wide-spread data collection.

Do you suspect that government provided email services will be instituted with the best-in-class end-to-end encryption algorithms? Do you suspect those troves of emails in a government server will be protected by government employees from overly broad subpoenas? Do you suspect the government will hire the best & brightest engineers to constantly push the envelope of how those services are delivered and the features they provide? Do you suspect government servers will consistently run on reliable, cost efficient infrastructure?

> Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.

Who gets to define "critical services"? Email didn't even exist as such a widespread part of our lives until private enterprise invested the hundreds of billions of dollars getting us to this point. Now that the ecosystem is established, you think the government should step in and strictly regulate it because a private company offering a private service terminated the account of one of its billions of users.

What else do you suppose is a "critical service" beyond email? Should we include cell phones? What about the news? Email seems such an arbitrary choice, but it is a great example to illustrate the dangers of this approach.

To switch back to TFA - and Google canceling this pour soul's account... What we don't hear about are the millions of accounts which Google terminates due to actual "valid" ToS violations. What we have is anecdotes, but what don't know are the true and false positive rates, or even the true/false negative rates of their abuse detection systems.

I believe Google needs to do a lot better with dispute resolution when an account is flagged for termination. This is true across their properties -- Gmail, AdWords, Store, etc. But I don't have the context & data I would need to pass judgement on the anecdotal failures I hear about semi-regularly.

I'm glad for the services that Google has created, because they push the whole industry forward in many ways, and they also provide incredible value for both users and Google alike. The ecosystem Google has created is an extremely impressive technological achievement, and the scale that they operate on is boggling.

The past is littered with failed examples of governments taking over and then failing to innovate or maintain an industry, whereas the examples of when government works side-by-side with private enterprise to create opportunities where the incentives did not align to allow a fully private solution are equally numerous. Government works best when it builds the roads to allow private industry to innovate upon, but doesn't try to build the figurative cars and trucks too.

That wasn’t a non-profit, neither were the first telegraph companies. Monopolies are problematic, private companies are not.

As far as cleaning out “old” politicians — that’s ageism. One’s birthdate doesn’t determine technical literacy.

Statistically speaking, it very much does...

Would you bet your money, when age is the only available information, that 1000 randomly chosen people in the 60-80 bracket would have equal or more technical literacy than 1000 randomly chosen people in the 30-50 bracket rather than less?

Didn't think so.

We acknowledge that infants do not have the capability to competently vote, yeah? We have a minimum voting age requirement, which shows that we don’t find all action based on correlation with age to be illegitimate.

I think I am probably forgetting the original context.

Suppose that you are running a class at a local library on how to use some software, and you intend for it to be accessible whether or not the people attending have some specific background knowledge, but it is easier and faster if they do, because you don’t have to explain the background first. Suppose you also have a note sheet that you give out for them to take home in case they forgot any details. You actually have 2 versions of the note sheet, because one version also includes an explanation of the background information, and therefore takes more pages of paper.

Every time you run this class, you find that some of the people attending need the version including the background information, even if all of them are young, but you also notice that people over a certain age are statistically more likely need the longer sheet.

Therefore, when you know that a particular session you are running has a greater than average number of people over that age, you print more of the longer version of the notes sheet. Have you acted wrongly in doing so?

Is doing so “ageist”?

I don’t think so.

I would imagine in such situations, that the people with the largest amount of background in the topic would likely also skew somewhat older, at least for some topics.

But, seeing as I forgot the context outside of your comment itself, probably this hypothetical is quite unlike the situation in the context.

Edit: Ah, the context was politicians. Ok. Idk how to apply this to politicians.

I suppose I am not especially concerned for the individual politicians’ interests, as, aiui, politicians in the US tend to be fairly well off, have enough savings to retire, etc.

Therefore, the goal should be primarily based on how the choice of politicians impacts the rest of the populace.

There may be issues where a way of choosing politicians could cause or reenforce harmful stereotypes that harm other non-politicians?

I agree that it's draconian and goes too far but government very commonly screws people over over minor things by using monopolistic behavior like this and there are many people (including many people here) that endorse it when it (dis)incentivizes something they want (dis)incentivized. Point is this behavior will not go away if you have a public email provider. The list of triggers just becomes different. What Google doesn't like is different than the US government doesn't like is different than... you get the point. You may at least get due process though which would be good but the fundamental "this person has offended our organization so we're gonna screw them every way we can" behavior won't change unless society demands it.

edit: I'd be interested to hear why everyone finds my opinion so disagreeable.

I and a lot of other people are fine with that. Patron et al. showed that people are willing to support things they like. From podcasts to open source projects.

The narrative that the only way to have nice things on the internet is via advertisers' money is pushed by the advertisers themselves.

Not everyone has to do it, but there is enough of people to keep creativity free from influance ad companies.

There's upside to this too: it provides business opportunities. I think it's necessary for a healthy well-functioning economy.

Email existed before Google. The email services didn't all used to be owned and controlled by giants. Remember Hotmail and Yahoo Mail?

Email doesn't have to be a Government-provided utility service as another poster claims. It doesn't have to be free or paid. The market will make it work.

Just don't let Google operate it.

It's a simple narrative.

Google doesn’t “operate” email. Gmail one email service among many, that people can choose to use or not. Yahoo Mail is still an option.

I bet people will prefer "need to pay" as a shock instead of "locked out" as a shock (with no option of getting your stuff back). I certainly would prefer the former.

Then charge me 1-2$ a month for gmail access... oh wait I already pay for extra storage. I'm quite fine paying if it means that if for some reason I offend them and they decide to suspend my service that I have a window where I'm allowed to exit their ecosystem.

Remove my ability to send email, allow me to receive email and give me a 1 week period to export everything and change contact info elsewhere.

Its not yet known whether its true or not. There are no proofs in the github thread. He could at least post his google email so some google employee could check since this thread got heavily upvoted

Unfortunate that it’s necessary but I think it’s a good idea for everyone who can.

By having G Suite and your own domain, you get to port that domain to another email provider if something bad did happen with Google.

This is different to the various techniques, such as IMAP/POP and forwarding, used to get [email protected] email (actually hosted elsewhere) into a [email protected] mailbox

I've had it this way for a long time, but I believe it was optional and it's also possible to only read the mail from the domain but send it via gmail.

Admittedly this doesn't work from my mobile GMail app, but I don't send a lot of work-related email (which my alternate address is for) from my smartphone.

If you want to send from a different address without the sender header being set to your gmail account, I think you have to have Gsuite.

Then when you compose a message from either the website or the Android app, your From address is a dropdown containing the addresses you set up.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/22370?hl=en

Hyperbole but not by far. Google's filter is trained on billions of messages a day, tuned by their own systems and by other users. It's the single best selling point for hosted email. Nothing compares when you've got that sort of volume.

I've had about three spam come through in the past year and they've all been personally addressed, non-bot but unsolicited marketing emails. I have three catch-all domains in this account.

We used to run our one domain through a passthrough service (at the cost of hundreds of pounds a year). Gmail was always right, easier to correct and by the point you're paying per-user (not per address), much much cheaper.

Sure, you can start to rebuild without changing your email address, but it's no less catastrophic when you get locked out.

It's been said many times before, but it's best to pay for stuff, even (and especially) when you can get a good product/service for only ~$5/month.

I don't use GMail's web interface but prefer an actual mail reader which has no problem with using a different address. Maybe I should use an IMAP mailreader for GMail on Android as well.

If you have regular backups, all you have to do is change a DNS record to switch to a different provider and you shouldn't lose any email in the process.

This is what I and many others do. I have had the same email address for ~20 years and have had it hosted on at least a half dozen providers over that time with no loss in data.

I'm always amazed at how quickly people jump into these massive corporate product/service ecosystems gung-ho as if we haven't learned anything about large business behaviors (including technology companies) over decades and decades of history.

You should always remember that a business has one goal: to make money for its shareholders. Anything and everything else is a side effect, so if you can forsee any goals you have utilizing a business product/service ecosystem not in direct alignment with a specific businesses' shareholders' interest in profit, then you should hedge your bets and have backup plans if you interconnect important aspects of your life with that business.

To me, this includes career paths which is why it's always fun to see businesses get heavily entrenched in AWS or some other ecosystem when their needs don't even require the benefits AWS actually provide. I'm singling out AWS because that's the case I'm dealing with on current projects at a current employer but it applies to any similar ecosystem.

This companies should not be able to suspend your account for everything, if my son broke some TOS rule on my console I should not have to have access blocked to anything except online gaming, my emails. my phone , my apps should still work.

Which of course completely defeats the "security" of this "security feature", but that's probably not the point of it anyway, they just want your phone number for meta data collection.

I don't disagree that Google could do a better job firewalling TOS violations in one service from blowing up all your interaction with Google, but in the short run, defense in depth.

There's no "unlinking" it unless you manually modify the serial numbers on the device, which is possible, if you have qualcomm diagnostic tools (QPST/QXDM) and are able to communicate to the modem softband directly.

It's a rock-and-a-hard-place problem, since the most common scenario Google is dealing with is criminal enterprises trying to obfuscate their activity behind dozens of "independent" accounts (so of course they have to try unifying accounts). But this is analogous to the scenario one deals with separating concerns when forming an LLC; you keep your work and personal stuff separate, including finances and capital (i.e. don't do work stuff on your personal computer; that's riksing having your LLC status collapse if someone has occasion to sue you).

The kicker is I am authenticated on the new phone! But cannot make changes because of the 2FA bug. So at some point, randomly, it decided to revert to an old phone number. Even though I am certain I disabled it!

I feel even submitting a detailed report, it would take quite a while to pierce the layers of bureaucracy and come into contact with a technical human that can diagnose and understand the nature of this issue ;(

In these contexts, you should have a recovery mechanism in place such as recovery codes or a recovery email.

We know nothing about this person. Isn't it very possible he was actually violating Google's terms in some way?

All you can ever really do is hope to not be caught up in something Google (or its bots) considers "bad".

EDIT: A few catchall terms from YouTube's TOS:

"YouTube may, in its sole discretion, modify or revise these Terms of Service and policies at any time, and you agree to be bound by such modifications or revisions."

"You agree not to access Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Service itself, the Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate." (There go all New Pipe accounts)

"YouTube reserves the right to discontinue any aspect of the Service at any time."

"YouTube reserves the right to decide whether Content violates these Terms of Service for reasons other than copyright infringement, [...]. YouTube may at any time, without prior notice and in its sole discretion, [...] terminate a user's account for submitting such material in violation of these Terms of Service."

So the probleme to be able to use that GDPR feature... is to still have an account

If you are allowed to use takeout, they link you to that on the account suspended page.

Google's policies, as required by their privacy policy, are to delete all data associated with a suspended account in 30 days.

That means any GDPR request submitted after the account is suspended will be responded to on the 30th day, and the response will be "we hold no data about that account".

We already have that if the e-mail address was "yours" to begin with, you can buy domains and keep using e-mail addresses pointing to them, moving to whatever e-mail provider you prefer this decade.

You have no ownership claim to the domain gmail.com. You are merely renting it, and for free no less!

Stop acting entitled. If you want ownership, the option already exists, and it’s easy: get your own domain.

That’s yours to keep and manage as you see fit, with Gmail a possible service attached to it as you see fit.

But your attitude seems to convey that you find this behavior acceptable.

The majority of people don't have the tech know how to do what you're saying. Are we to leave them unrepresented and vulnerable? How many other people has this happened to that haven't been able to file bug reports on Github?

The solution here isn't a fine. Companies just laugh at those and continue on with business as usual. The real fix is to take Gmail (and the domain) away from Google.

I'll be voting for legislators with the nerve to do this.

No one is stopping anyone from paying Fastmail or using a slew of other services than Google, other than people’s unwillingness to pay for things.

A natural monopoly exists anywhere there are extremely high infrastructure costs, such as running pipes and wires to every home. The same thing exists with mobile networks, as it requires towers everywhere.

And that’s without roaming, which I don’t understand, as it means I have cheaper mobile minutes/texts/data in the USA and Germany than most locals.

Irrelevant, and also true of phone numbers (not accounts, numbers).

> Stop acting entitled. If you want ownership, the option already exists, and it’s easy: get your own domain.

You and I can do that easily. Doesn’t mean other people can. Division of skills and focusing on what you’re good at is a foundational principal of our global economy.

On the other hand, making a thing available at below cost so as to push the competition out of business sounds to me like an “unfair monopoly”.

Yandex, pretty decent email web interface, and I can have my own @domain.com emails for free, if I ever need to move away from Yandex I can do so without telling everybody I "changed my email".

But I doubt Yandex will ever "inspire" me to move away form them, I think they dont even think of me at all, unlike Googles algorithms.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#sig...

AFAIK Google has no such requirements for apps on Android.

As more and more people use "Sign in with Apple" it will end up being the same issue. If Apple locks your account they'll ruin your life.

I generally use neither. I don't sign into things with Google nor Apple nor Facebook. The exception is I do sign into a few dev related things with github but only of they are related to my github account (example, Travis CI). I also have my own domain as I learned the hard way in the 90s that losing your email address to your ISP is no fun.

Basically Apple says: you are required to offer choices and you can’t force users to only use Facebook/Google. A big difference and a big win for choice.

Whereas Drive, Mail, etc. are all deeply connected to it. So seems the punitive measure is specifically setup to have the most impact on you. Within their right, granted, but I feel for anyone who shares a device with someone who wants to circumvent ads in YouTube while they're logged in as they could be the person punished for reasons they don't understand.

Stuff like this are downright scary but there is absolutely nothing we can do. Google is too big to fail now for consumers

But really humans are happy to do it to each other ...

So make sure you never access them both from the same computer, phone or IP.

In the case of AdWords, your billing address is also a linking factor.

In the case of Google Cloud, being Owner of the same project or organisation is a linking factor.

In the case of Google Payments, using the same bank details is a linking factor (also applies to GCloud).

That's the thing, you have no control over what Google does and little recourse once they do it.

But this is just the beginning. Cloud is next, raising prices, preventing people from leaving by crating apis you cant simply rewrite... Mainframe history all over again.

(disclaimer: googless for a decade, once I prediceted where this is going I became completely self hosted, learned to build my own roms without gms etc. Today is much easyer with microg, newpipe, aurora, apktool, ... On the other side, people are less and less knowlidgable as a result of helpers from companies and dependant to them. I am eager to see how this will end)

ANY identity provider (meaning email, facebook, ...) can terminate any account BUT MUST provide a temporary (maybe 1 month) minimum service (maybe only replying to incoming emails for example, with a cap) to allow identity migration out of the platform... because identity can't be owned by anybody.

It doesn't need to apply to ANY website, ONLY to website providing some identity service (like email or auth provider).

And this could be quite a simple law. It wouldn't forbid the website to cancel accounts, only would they have to give enough time and functionalities to properly manage the cancellation and its impact on the user digital life

Also after hearing these stories, I keep my cloud accounts as light as possible and use S3 + NAS for actual data.

It's harder and harder, Sign-up UIs are hiding it. Sign-in with Google or Facebook is really the norm nowadays.

How about users that don't like the TOS just find another service? I'm perfectly happy with the way things are.