The vitriol regarding Google's services is unjustified.
Gmail is a free service. Google allows you to use it for free, in exchange for being shown ads. You have access to the same infrastructure that paying clients use, and the same uptime, but without paying. You can download all of your data easily, and at any time. Nothing about that is predatory on the free users.
What would you say is the appropriate market "price" of 10-hour turnaround on emergency technical help? Having worked at a company that provided optional sub-24-hour response, I can tell you it's usually expensive.
Nope. Completely untrue. They benefit from us using their services. We are doing them a favour by choosing them over others - their business is built upon people using their services.
If everyone just their our money back (£0) and stopped using Google's services, they wouldn't have a business any more.
By using a service such as Gmail, we've trusted them and invested our on-line lives in them in order that they can monetise that usage and grow their business.
It is completely unacceptable when that trust is betrayed and they cut you off without recourse.
Google definitely benefits from free Gmail users, but that wouldn't be true if every free user got human attention when things went wrong, regardless of who was at fault.
I guess I see OP's problem stemming from the existence of bugs/quirks/spam attacks. As a developer, I know these things are simply impossible to prevent with 100% certainty. I don't feel that Google is morally culpable for bugs or spammers, unless they are somehow adding bugs to the point of negligence.
In fact, as a developer, the idea of being morally culpable for bugs scares me, since that kind of implies I am doomed to be immoral.
Well, that depends on why I need the "emergency help". If I need it for their problem, then I expect it for free, given that I am already "paying" for the service with my ad views and my personal data.
If I need it because I screwed something up, that's a different (and irrelevant) discussion.
I shouldn't need emergency technical help. If they want to provide a reliable service which I can use to convince them that I should be allowed to access my own data, that would be really swell and should not require full blown tech support nonsense.
Gmail is a free service. Google allows you to use it for free, in exchange for being shown ads. You have access to the same infrastructure that paying clients use, and the same uptime, but without paying. You can download all of your data easily, and at any time. Nothing about that is predatory on the free users.
What would you say is the appropriate market "price" of 10-hour turnaround on emergency technical help? Having worked at a company that provided optional sub-24-hour response, I can tell you it's usually expensive.