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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

Google is stuck with gmail whether they like it or not.

Gmail is used by what, 1.8 billion people? And e-mail isn't some small take-it-or-leave-it feature. Even disregarding the mail itself, e-mail is central as a form of online ID for accounts.

If Google tried to kill Gmail there would be an uproar of incredible proportions.

Realistically, their best bet for getting rid of it would be to gradually abandon it, making it slower, less reliable, taking away features, etc over the course of a decade or two. But even then, they'd likely need to wait another ~40 years for generational effects to kick in and most people to get off of it.

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Crazy to think that technically Google has every right to just turn off gmail one day. No warning, no advisories. Just shut off the servers. They don't even have to acknowledge it.

In theory, but never in practice.

The big kicker that makes it impractical is that most businesses and government organizations use GMail. There's so much money and power out there that would pressure Google into fixing it immediately. If they seriously tried it would be endless, endless lawsuits about all the lost productivity, valuable company information, etc.

If Google made their intentions clear, I bet it wouldn't stay down for more than 3 days before they relented due to all that pressure.

Lets just say you have ~$2 Trillion burning a hole in your pocket and buy google, take it private. At day one you could shut down the normal gmail service for basically everyone who don't pay for it, right? For most business accounts I'm guessing you need to wait for the next billing cycle, but that would be next month in most cases. For special accounts it might be longer but those would be a very small number.

Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore?

> Could anyone win a lawsuit against a serviceprovider for (completely within the terms of the contract) not wanting to provide a service anymore?

The problem is that with a 1B+ people dependent on the product, shutting it off wouldn't just get you lawsuits, but also visits from scary men in suits and extralegal actions.

You may very well be coerced into switching the service back on - at the end of the day, contracts are just pieces of paper.

Crazy to think that technically Apple has every right to just turn off iCloud or the App Store one day. No warning, no advisories. Just shut off the servers. They don't even have to acknowledge it. No more software for a few billion devices.

They sell it to companies as part of Google Workspace. That comes with guarantees.

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