>I'd like to see an enforced separation in law between commercial application providers and storage providers. So, if someone writes an app like Google Docs, they can't just store the data opaquely on their own cloud servers. They legally have to integrate with a separate storage provider. And that storage provider has an obligation to make my data accessible and manageable by me.
Same can be said about gmail. In the old days, one can access gmail via imap/pop3. I believe that was removed. All email ought to provide an alternative way of getting the email other than company's web interface.