However, few if any of these protections typically apply to someone who is using a service for free, such as people with Facebook accounts. As soon as real money is changing hands, it becomes much harder for the recipient of that money to get away with not keeping up their side of the bargain.

Someone who has in the past exchanged real money with Verizon, Comcast and AT&T, I would again submit that the situation is not as simple as you're saying.

I'd be the first to agree that it's not that simple, and that the legal system in many places is not a very effective tool for providing justice in "low value" cases. But even then, there may be consumer representative bodies or government regulators that maintain dedicated funds to pursue bad actors in such situations, possibly through other means. In places like the US, you also have the possibility of class actions if a large organisation is taking advantage of the imbalance to harm lots of customers a little bit each.

Are you actually suggesting that consumer protection laws should prevent businesses from cutting features and discontinuing products?

Of course not. But if, for example, you're paying for a deal where someone hosts your domain and e-mail for a year, and where the domain is to be held in your name so you can transfer it to another provider if you wish, you are obviously entitled to have that hosting for the year you paid for and to your escape mechanism with the domain name if either party chooses not to renew the deal later.

With a system like Facebook or Google Mail, you have little recourse if they decide arbitrarily to close the business down tomorrow, and you have no control over your identity on that system or what would happen to it after any changes.