The fact that so many people who otherwise care about things like privacy, freedom, and competition all flocked to gmail anyway always seemed completely bananas to me. It's like a case study in how principle (or even long term self-interest) always loses to convenience.

I'm guilty as charged. I even sought out a Gmail Beta* invite back in the day. At the time I was naive and believed Google's "don't be evil" marketing.

*I later also sought out a Google+ Beta invite. That one is harder to justify with just naïveté.

Many of us did this back in the day, and now we're stuck with our gmail addresses.

No, you're not.

It might be a pain to move, but it is certainly possible, and it's certainly worth the effort.

Just be grateful you aren't stuck with a Yahoo address ;-). Owning your own domain name(s) is worth a few bucks a month.

In order to avoid interacting with it at all, you'd have to check the MX records of the domains behind the e-mail addresses of every one of your contacts, and then stop e-mailing the ones who use gmail.

They've gone out of their way to become impossible to reasonably avoid.

Regulatory action is the only thing that will stop them from completely destroying the concept of decentralization on the internet.