Gmail consolidation is happening not because of some evil plan, it's happening because of the economics.
In fact it's exactly the same reason why Mozilla is increasingly not sustainable. Email hosting is simply not a lucrative business. That's why it's all run by large portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. which use them not to make money but to collect information about people, and monetize through ads or other indirect methods. Of course, this only becomes profitable at scale, and there are not that many companies at that scale.
In fact it's exactly the same reason why Mozilla is increasingly not sustainable. Email hosting is simply not a lucrative business. That's why it's all run by large portals like Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, etc. which use them not to make money but to collect information about people, and monetize through ads or other indirect methods. Of course, this only becomes profitable at scale, and there are not that many companies at that scale.