> I'm in the camp that paying makes you a customer. Inversely using a free service makes you a user, not a customer.
I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.
Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.
Thats not exactly a new question. Netscape would also like an answer.
Obviously the short answer, for you personally, is "nothing". You cannot affect either the closing business or Google.
The somewhat longer answer is that there are certainly other mail services that currently exist. So there are still options. And yes, those services will need to differentiate their offering.
[Some will no doubt mention the option to self-host. I did that myself for about 15 years. It's a lot of extra work to do that though.]
Obviously some services (like YouTube) are double-sided. Consumers go there because producers are there and vice versa. But, as you point out, even there you have choices - free with ads, or subscription. (Not that you'll get any "customer support" from Google.)
your paid email address would now always end up in people's spam folder by default, because the big 2 don't trust any email not originating from the big 2
I agree, but what do you do when a large player like Google kills the competition by making their service available for free? I used to pay for email hosting with good customer support. That company went out of business when free GMail wrecked their business model. I moved to another hosting service, which almost immediately went out of business for the same reason.
Something similar happened with YouTube. It's chock full of ads and/or subscriptions now because they subsidized it long enough to ensure competitors couldn't gain a foothold.