Trite reminder: Google sells advertising, not email accounts. P**ing off an individual email user (or many tens of thousands of them) is not something they are going to worry about. What are you going to do, stop using the Internet?
Not trust their AdWords and look for alternatives.
Not trust GCP and use aws and azure.
Not trust new products.
Google’s brand is interconnected and it’s shortsighted of them to think “it’s just a few thousand inconvenienced.”
Imagine if Whole Foods also had a product line that sold caviar and they swapped it out for dog shit and they didn’t care because it only affected a few thousand customers. It’s not the number of customers that are important, it’s the reflection of the organization.
It’s deontology vs utilitarianism. Trying to do spot based utilitarian calculations without considering what principles lead to overall good is a stupid thing for an org to do.
As the OP said, What are you going to do, stop using the Internet?
Google can coast for 30 more years, or longer.
Comcast is slowly dying but will be profitable for a long, long time.
So you can have a bad brand and exist for a long time.
No, simply cut them out of my life while using AdNauseum to bleed them dry. The Internet existed before Google and will continue existing after they are gone.