I think the other answers are misinterpreting your question. A user is held "hostage" because unlike fastmail where the format is word.salad@yourdomain; if you ever wanted to ditch iCloud completely, you'd have to go through every single account you used it for and update the email. As someone who has shed his gmail account I can tell you it's not easy to update email address on every site you've ever used it on. The issue people are raising is that apple doesn't let you use your own domain, and generate random emails at that domain. Not my complaint, but I can see the perspective.
Hostage may be a bad analogy. More like a game of chicken. Imagine you are a regular @icloud.com email user. Apple is basically saying "I dare you to block all @icloud.com email and lose all these customers"
you could say the same thing about AWS or Cloudflare hosting anybody and everybody. Spain actually started blocking a bunch of their IP blocks during football matches due to a poorly thought out legal decision.
I think the other answers are misinterpreting your question. A user is held "hostage" because unlike fastmail where the format is word.salad@yourdomain; if you ever wanted to ditch iCloud completely, you'd have to go through every single account you used it for and update the email. As someone who has shed his gmail account I can tell you it's not easy to update email address on every site you've ever used it on. The issue people are raising is that apple doesn't let you use your own domain, and generate random emails at that domain. Not my complaint, but I can see the perspective.
I mean, that is no different than any other provider.
If you want to degoogle, you still have to go to each site and change your staticuser@gmail.com individually.
Most users already do not use custom domains if that's the catch.
Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.
That doesn’t explain how the user is held “hostage” by Apple
Hostage may be a bad analogy. More like a game of chicken. Imagine you are a regular @icloud.com email user. Apple is basically saying "I dare you to block all @icloud.com email and lose all these customers"
you could say the same thing about AWS or Cloudflare hosting anybody and everybody. Spain actually started blocking a bunch of their IP blocks during football matches due to a poorly thought out legal decision.