If it's just shutting down an account, probably true. But if GMail started giving people's email accounts to other people, which would allow other people to start receiving their bank statements, business correspondence, password resets, etc., I don't think it would be an open/shut case. Courts would likely want to do something about it, and there are various legal theories that are broad enough to potentially be employed, e.g. detrimental reliance on representations, tortious interference, or contributory negligence.
Consider an extreme case: someone is using GMail for their business. Google cuts a deal with their competitor to intercept the business's email and send it to the competitor. Would this be legal? If Gmail accounts and the email in them are unrestricted Google property that it may dispose of as it wishes, then it would be; Google can of course sell its own internal email to anybody it wants. But my guess is that this scenario wouldn't be legal, despite the fact that the business is not paying Google for the email account, and Google owns the servers that are receiving the mail.
If it's just shutting down an account, probably true. But if GMail started giving people's email accounts to other people, which would allow other people to start receiving their bank statements, business correspondence, password resets, etc., I don't think it would be an open/shut case. Courts would likely want to do something about it, and there are various legal theories that are broad enough to potentially be employed, e.g. detrimental reliance on representations, tortious interference, or contributory negligence.
Consider an extreme case: someone is using GMail for their business. Google cuts a deal with their competitor to intercept the business's email and send it to the competitor. Would this be legal? If Gmail accounts and the email in them are unrestricted Google property that it may dispose of as it wishes, then it would be; Google can of course sell its own internal email to anybody it wants. But my guess is that this scenario wouldn't be legal, despite the fact that the business is not paying Google for the email account, and Google owns the servers that are receiving the mail.