The most important part of this: "With that said, I think it’s a bad idea to use a @gmail.com address (or any other domain name you don’t own). If Google – or your email service of choice – does turn evil or shuts down, at best you have to change your email address, and at worst they own a critical part of your online identity."
I understand that some people are too lazy (or whatever) and use Gmail. But do you really assume that you won't switch your mail or chat provider for the rest of your life? That's exactly like the people who used @hotmail.com a decade ago.
Your own domain costs $10-20 per year and it's trivial to setup (either on your own server or with Google Apps). And if you decide at some point that you want to switch to another provider, all you need to do is to point a few records (MX, XMPP, SPF) to your new provider - this only takes a few minutes to do.
Google has an incentive to be nice: they only make money and continue to exist if people use their products. If they suddenly take everyone's gmail address, the backlash would be incomprehensible. There would be Senate hearings and an infinite amount of Internet Hate.
But registrars are smaller and probably wouldn't face any financial consequences for stealing your domain name and selling it to someone with more money. You would be mad, but since it only affected you, there would be very little you could do. No hearings. No Internet outrage.
Alternatively, someone could sue you for your domain name, and you'd never be able to afford to mount a reasonable defense. Google, on the other hand, could afford to do that.
I think once a company gets to be Fortune 500 in size, they probably aren't going to do anything too drastic. It's the smaller ones that can be bought or do something unethical because they don't have shareholders or a board of directors. (Then again, that didn't stop Enron. But they fucked over their employees, not their customers.)
I assume that the chances for you being sued for your domain are much lower than the chances of Google randomly disabling your account. Which has happened in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354593 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2798048 - seems that for some of the disabled Google+ account all other Google services have been disabled too. If the registrar steals your domain you would still have the possiblity to go to court to get it back. If Google disables your account you can't do that.
The highest (but still small) risk when having your own domain is that some company claims it has a trademark on the name. But you can mitigate this my (1) using your real name or some other nickname as the domainname and (2) using the .name namespace instead of .com.
I don't see what you're saying. Big Pharm sells drugs to insurance companies. Oracle sells databases to CTOs. Monsanto sells weed killers to farmers.
Yes, these activities all have externalities; drugs would be better if people could pay for them themselves, databases would be better if programmers picked them out, and farming would be better if Monsanto didn't patent genes. But ultimately, none of these companies try to harm their customers. We just don't like them because we aren't their customers.
Google is in a weird position where they have two sets of customers; users and advertisers. Both need to be pleased, even though their interests are in conflict, or Google will die. So there's a financial incentive to be nice to users, and as a user, that means they should be nice to you.
I disagree with this. Users are not customers, we are the product. Google need only be slightly better than the second best option. Now that they have such momentum in search I don't see any reason why they need to care about users, only advertisers.
Google does have a bidding system for ads, that's true, but if everyone stops using Google, then the ads become worthless and Google goes out of business.
It's easy to look at as "Google is just selling eyeballs", but it's not that simple; Google has to please both the advertisers and the people looking at the ads. And, of course, there are the various paid products (Earth Pro, Docs, etc.) that Google offers.
I switched from my domain ( a .co.uk) to gmail for personal email because it makes things clearer to other people. Being @gmail means people know to gchat you or send you a google doc. Or add you to an analytics account. A bunch of third party tools like browser plugins, gmail mail clients also don't work with apps for domains first. That has become less of an issue over time, but there has certainly been a reduced hassle just having a gmail account.
The act of maintaining an email server and managing your relationship with well-known peers (especially with major mail service providers) is unfortunately nontrivial.
The big dogs often act as if they own the Net, which, in a sense, they do (they account for a very large portion of email). And even as rational actors, they'll prioritize delivery/peer issues with other larger providers and organizations over Joe Part-time-postmaster. This isn't 1996 any more.
Not saying you can't do it, but you may find that you'll want to at least use a larger MSP as a your egress pathway.
I have a lot of gripes over Google (evil or otherwise) myself, but they are among my mail providers.
If you use Google Apps (as suggested in my post) the "goodness in terms of security and spam filtering" would be EXACTLY THE SAME as when using plain gmail.com.
I understand that some people are too lazy (or whatever) and use Gmail. But do you really assume that you won't switch your mail or chat provider for the rest of your life? That's exactly like the people who used @hotmail.com a decade ago.
Your own domain costs $10-20 per year and it's trivial to setup (either on your own server or with Google Apps). And if you decide at some point that you want to switch to another provider, all you need to do is to point a few records (MX, XMPP, SPF) to your new provider - this only takes a few minutes to do.