[odux]

The are critical pieces of the modern world yes. But not a utility. One cannot live without a utility and utilities generally have a monopoly in most places. If my power or water company bans me for some reason I am toast. I have to endure undue hardship to get something that provides may be 10% of the utility (own well, water pump, generator...). Internet itself (the pipes) on the other hand are probably a utility. I prefer the natural gas like solution though for internet. Someone owns the infrastructure and it is heavily regulated. Multiple other companies resell it, provide addon services etc. But search, email etc are like cars in the US. Essential, but also a business operating in a competitive space.

[franga2000]

A service does not have to be a monopoly to be classified as a utility, nor does it have to be life-threatening if inaccessible. Mobile phone in my country is provided by 4 major independent companies (and this isn't the US but a country with only a few M people, so 4 big providers is a pretty good number) and they are still required to allow free transfers of numbers to other providers.

> One cannot live without a utility...

If my water got shut off, my life would go on pretty normally - drinking water is cheap in stores, bars are required to provide it free of charge and I can shower at a friend's place or something. If I lost my email account however, I'd have months of work ahead of me just to restore my digital life to its previous state and my livelihood would be at risk. All bills go to my email so I couldn't pay for the services I and my business need, business partners wouldn't be able to reach me, neither would my customers... In fact, I can't really think of any other single thing that would cause more problems if lost than my email account(s).

[fallingknife]

The problem with that logic is that just the plain internet access is becoming less and less useful everyday as the internet moves more towards walled gardens. It's like if the basic phone service only allowed you to communicate with other land lines, but you had to have an account with Google / Apple to make and receive calls with Iphones / Androids.

[jedberg]

Cars are fungible, email address not so much. If you get banned from owning or servicing your Honda, you can sell your Honda and get a Toyota.

If you get banned from using your Gmail, you can't just switch to Hotmail.

[BeetleB]

If you own your own domain and use that with Gmail, you absolutely can switch to another provider and keep your email address if Gmail bans you.

Using your car analogy: If Honda provides me a car for free, I don't expect them to allow me to do whatever I want with the car that I don't own.

[jedberg]

So you think it would be ok for Honda to show up at your house and say "You can't have this anymore we're taking it" and then take all the stuff that happens to be in the car, even if you are using it for free?

[BeetleB]

I expect that Honda will set the terms under which I can use the car, and if I don't like them, I need to buy my own car.

As for the stuff in the car, it's a poor analogy. The stuff in your Gmail account is easy to duplicate, unlike physical stuff, and it's your responsibility to back it up.

As you can guess, I don't use free email services, and I don't rely on the mail always being in the hands of a provider - I always have my own copy via IMAP. This was the normal way to do email, and the barrier to entry is low - most people doing this in those days were not tech folks.

It's just silly to demand that a company spend money to provide something to you for free, and then demand they be treated as a utility. Especially where plenty of alternatives exist.

[visarga]

> But search, email etc are like cars in the US.

The big players in search, email, social have a larger market share than the big car producers. There's no 'Google' or 'Facebook' of cars.

[fnord77]

if someone has everything tied to their gmail account and google bans them, they're toast.