With more and more stuff requiring online enrollment and access, getting a decades-old email account with everything in your life attached to, the surface area for potential life disruption is going to be similar to being canceled. We discovered during the pandemic how reliant we actually are on uncaring platforms that will issue a permaban on an account with sometimes no stated cause. This problem, IMHO, is the one big tech regulation that literally every government has been sleeping on. Instead they are focusing on dumb-shit, asinine issues like cookie warnings that (surprise) seem to do very little to actually protect people because nobody has the will, knowledge, or stones to make a regulatory change that actively targets behavior they wish to see eliminated (nonconsensual internet tracking) and would rather focus on a proxy for it (cookies), ultimately causing collateral damage by making a monster out of a core HTTP concept and contributing to banner fatigue through a hellish design-by-government-committee swill of utterly useless regulations. But I digress.
The USPS does not stop delivering mail nor does it revoke your home address if you send or are sent content they deem unfit for delivery (as is the case for many postal services around the world). A meaningful consumer protection would include an expansion into the concept of a “common carrier” to legally mandate a certain classes of online communications providers to not remove access to one’s account (barring an order coming directly from the courts) or they must provide a clear flow to migrate your data to a new email account and forward all messages there for the next N days. In return, they are given expanded safe harbor and indemnification from what the user does on their account.
What I found particularly troubling about twitter banning Trump was that this move of deplatforming was more impactful that literally anything other action taken towards him. Where one stands on the former president is largely irrelevant as this should be concerning because it exposes the elephant-sized lynchpin we have in modern communications: power to silence is heavily consolidated among a small number of players who do not answer and are indifferent to the needs of the general public. To be fair, they are not required to be, and with normal market forces, users are usually empowered to choose where to spend their time, but unfortunately the network effect is more powerful than market forces here resulting in a winner-take-all situation for each major platform subtype.