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Comment by acd10j | Hacker News Reader

All of the advice after fact would not help a person who actually lost his account. Nor if you are among 99.9 % of population who don’t know how to setup your own mailserver etc. Lots of advice here seems like victim blaming. If you have lost your google account then somehow it’s your fault. For me it seems a nightmare if it does happen to me as well. Can we discuss solutions that can help general public in these situations.

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Even if you don't know how to setup your own mailserver, you can still decide to pay for your email (protonmail, fastmail, etc.) to have it managed by a smaller company who makes money directly from their users hence have an incentive to treat them well.

Also not putting all your eggs in one bag is a good idea.

The real problem is that most users don't understand why they should pay for a service that Google provides them for free.

It seems more like a reminder that watch-out - it may happen to you too. I use personal domain that I prepay for 5 years in advance. I recently started using gmail account more and more, but this is another reminder that I may lose access to important business emails if I continue to rely on Google.

It's not victim blaming to recommend that people who know how ought to switch to more self-managed solutions, but I agree with you that doing so is not an option for the vast majority of people. I've always promoted the idea that anti-monopoly laws should be upgraded to be especially sensitive to network effects, now that so much of the economy is becoming networked. The bigger a tech company gets, the less power they should have to decide whose account gets suspended, what you can say, what videos you can show, etc.

"We're a private company" is no defense against traditional anti-monopoly enforcement. New powers that make Big Tech so big should be explicitly added to the dangers anti-monopoly regulation was created to defend against.

If Google wants to lure you in, they should end up being as stuck with you as you are with them.

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