Thank you for at least considering the idea seriously. I think the flaw with your argument is the assumption that price-sensitive consumers are paying directly for these services. Advertisers pay google, not people who use Gmail. In many cases, there's no way for a competitor to compete on price offering a cheaper service - because it's already "free" in the mind of consumers.

Also, please note: scheduled downtime is not the same thing as "less-reliable". A service that is always available when it promises to be might be said to be more reliable than a service that offered more availability but failed unpredictably at random.