> Imagine if Google's vendors stopped offering Google customer service. Janitor didn't show up today? Well, clean your own office toilet today, technie.
At their scale, this exact scenario happens all the time. The back-stop is that Google chooses to stop doing business with unreliable service providers.
This is also an option for Google users. Gmail competitors are just a click away.
If Google is not satisfied with the level of cleaning in their buildings and fires the custodial contractor, they don't lose access to their buildings because the janitors walked away with the keys. When people start using Gmail, they don't expect to someday lose access to their online banking and utility bills and all the rest, and by the time it does happen to them and they decide to look for a competitor, a lot more damage has been done due to missed bills, etc. It's not as lighthearted as, "Oh, this burger tastes bad, guess I'll go to a competitor's burger shack." If regulation improves the terms the users agree to so they have some way to get reasonable help from customer service and Google finds that too expensive, they can either charge for Gmail or shut it down.
> they don't lose access to their buildings because the janitors walked away with the keys
... You are actually ascribing a larger amount of have-their-shit-togetherness to Google than may be strictly true. Without telling too many stories that aren't mine, I'll say "Usually. They usually don't." ;)
But to extend your analogy a bit... Google doesn't lose physical access to their headquarters because security is not a third-party vendor. They keep the mission-critical stuff in-house. That would translate, analogously, to individual homeless or elderly people running their own mail servers (infeasible)... Or, perhaps, libraries running mail servers and providing accounts for patrons tied to their library cards (might be actually, maybe, feasible?).
> When people start using Gmail, they don't expect to someday lose access to their online banking and utility bills and all the rest, and by the time it does happen to them and they decide to look for a competitor, a lot more damage has been done due to missed bills, etc.
You're absolutely right, and the back stop is almost certainly to make people aware of this very significant risk factor in using Gmail instead of alternatives.
> If regulation improves the terms the users agree to so they have some way to get reasonable help from customer service and Google finds that too expensive, they can either charge for Gmail or shut it down.
If such regulation is impossible at the scale of serving 1.5 billion customers, which I assert it is until somebody can provide a practical road map for getting to that scenario, then your recommended remedy for "Gmail doesn't work reliably for a subset of its users" is "Deny its benefits to all of its users." That seems strictly worse than a solution where we encourage people to be conscious of their risk tolerance before signing up for service with a company that can't guarantee they won't get locked out of their account with no easy method to unlock it.
At their scale, this exact scenario happens all the time. The back-stop is that Google chooses to stop doing business with unreliable service providers.
This is also an option for Google users. Gmail competitors are just a click away.