Shutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.
They'd generate a huge amount of ill will by shutting it down, and that in turn would likely lead to a nontrivial share of people moving away from Google core products (like search) out of pure spite.
To what? Google Search sucks thanks to the idiot who ran Yahoo into the ground, but everyone else sucks more. Every time I try to use non-google search the results are virtually useless.
Google has firmly been in the "we're so big we can suck at everything, but you'll still use our stuff because you have no other choice" phase that Microsoft was (is?) in.
They've dominated email so much that their spam filter makes it a very risky proposition to run your own domain; chances are very good it'll just start dropping your messages. Even if chances aren't great, can you take the risk of an important email getting zapped?
To this day I still routinely have to fish out my gmail spam folder dozens of emails from various open source mailing lists that have been around for a decade or two, some hosted on kernel.org, because the spam filter is convinced they're spam. Google is too fucking stupid or lazy to whitelist sites like kernel.org.
FFS even google groups I'm in that are technical get obviously-not-spam messages tagged as spam!
No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one. Those people will still use email just fine. Moreover, the people who do use Gmail will simply sign up with another provider. It won't be a big deal.
> No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one.
Based on some data I collected around five years ago, roughly 80% of US customers used GMail for personal email. It was overwhelmingly the most common choice. I suspect that number has only drifted upwards since.
(What about the rest? 15% were using Yahoo; the rest were spread thinly across AOL, Microsoft, ISPs, and colleges.)
At one point AOL was the largest ISP and email provider on Earth too. If gmail died off people would just move to something else. It'd be annoying, but it wouldn't be the end of email
Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails
In a better time I would expect the government to step in a acquire this fundamental service and fund it with tax money. Right now? The only intervention I would expect is a massive subsidy to pay Google to keep providing it, while also letting them continue to spy on everyone's mail (which is a crime, but not if the mail is on a computer, I guess).
Why is this inconceivable? I don't know where you live, but the Post Office is extremely cheap and reliable around here. What drives you to pretend that states can't provide services to their people?
Depends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.
Unfortunately, the Constitution has been flagrantly ignored by the federal government for close to 100 years now, if not longer. Everything that FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, but nobody stopped him, nor did they roll it back when he was gone. The Constitution has no real practical power to restrain the government if the people don't exercise their rights as voters to hold it accountable, and it is abundantly clear that the unconstitutional stuff the government gets up to is (largely) actually pretty popular.
bullshit, email exists outside of gmail, and email would continue to exist without it. many would have to get a new account somewhere, but that would be not a problem. there are shitloads of providers that would be quite happy