...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
>>lou130+(OP)
True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort of standardized lookup though to support such a system.