thesanewriter

Yeah, I think this is done to provide the illusion of choice. The rate limits are high enough to allow personal emails through, but for any mass emails or corporate emails this forces you to use Google. Unfortunately a standard corporate strategy, it's why corporate office suites are so generic and tend to be from one of the big companies.

That's a sitewide setting, most apps and the main site have it.

The Verge's coverage of this so far has been really good. It's probably because they think drama like this will get a lot of clicks, but even still I've enjoyed their articles.

I like it when various programs at least ask before invasively scraping my data. If asked, I'll often say yes because I want to help the developers, but when it's silent and in the background I have no control and I don't like that

I also use Bing. I like the AI features and the rewards program. The results are meh in terms of quality, but at this point honestly so are Google's.