Owning your domain just changes your point of failure from Google to your registrar. It is not, in fact, any safer.

It's not like registrars haven't randomly shut down people's domains due to accidental (or malicious) abuse reports.

But as long as you're using a registrar in your own country and a TLD managed by a legal entity in your own country, you do have a path of legal recourse against both parties.

It might not be successful, but you do have far better options than relying on a third party in a country far away.

It's always a varying grade, not either/or.

Your registrar won't use automated tools to suddenly close your account. They have no reason to look at anything you're doing and most likely won't care as long as you pay your bills and they can pay theirs.

Google knows what you watch and post on Youtube, your emails, your google drive contents, your photos, contacts and everything. Any bit of that can trigger an automated ban for your account you can't recover from unless you know a Googler personally or can get through to their only working customer service outlet: the front page of HN.

The risk of loosing a domain, especially if used only for email, is lower than losing a google account. Using a gmail.com means that google owns both your emails and your email address and can do whatever they want with it.

Even if it's just your google account being locked for some random reason, good luck getting out of the situation and/or getting in touch with a human there.

If you can't access your gmail.com address anymore then you become locked out of so many other things.

Yes, I've started to think about this more seriously now in the UK. I have moderate political opinions, but I now ask myself will they be acceptable now or in the near future by the UK government or where my data is hosted (i.e. the US). Will I suddenly have an email account blocked or closed down for supporting a non-violent cause I believe in?

Horrible times when this has started to become a part of my thought process.

It's easier to keep track of your own IP addresses than whatever you'd hosts or DNS hack to over at Google.

Register with one provider and DNS with another. You can always use one to regain the other.

True, just happened to one of my friend. 10 years old gmail account got suspended because he supposedly sent phishing emails. Which is completely false (he didn’t even understood what pishing was, he had google authenticator for totp). Ofcourse the appeal process was useless as no one reply to those. It’s been 2 months now. Own your domain.