Should we demand to pay for Social Media?

This week, GrrlScientist wrote an open letter to Google after her account was deactivated without warning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/punctuated-equilibrium/2011/jul/28/google-open-letter-google

While she argues that she did not contravene their terms and conditions (as they were claiming), I believe that they are legally within their rights to deactivate it anyway.  And it raises an interesting point.  We all rely so much on free services provided by companies like Google and Facebook that we (or certainly I) would be lost without them.  If Google one day decided to deactivate my  gmail account then I would lose all my emails from the last few years.  And since I have a tendency to forget passwords for websites, I would be permanently logged out of most of my other accounts, because the websites have no other contact address for me.

And even worse, what if Google decided tomorrow that they had been successful enough and were going to stop trading immediately, deactivating all gmail accounts.  There would be complete chaos!

Because we are getting these services for free, the companies legally owe us very little.  The obvious solution would be for us to pay for the services and got more rights and guarantees in return.  I wouldn't dream of getting all my post sent to an address manned for free by someone who I had never met, so why do I do so with my emails?

Saying that, people have got too used to receiving all these services for free so it would be a very hard sell to get them to pay for it.

What do you think?  Is there another solution?