In honor of the recent gmail outage.Lets imagine that Google somehow caught a perfect storm and actually lost all gmail data. All of it. (I realize this is as close to impossible as you can get, but that's why it's a gedanken experiment). What would happen?
Because so many people use it for business communication, I think it'd have long-term effects on the economy that would be really difficult (but interesting) to measure.
It's not a perfect example, because you can get your mails out of GMail, but - This kind of thing might be what it takes to pass legislation forcing data services to provide access (see http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1617 )
This doomsday scenario sounds so unlikely that it gets to the point of being ludicrous...