I wouldn't really call what happened to email a success. In reality, email these days looks much like your first scenario. Email is GMail and a few other large

I wouldn't really call what happened to email a success. In reality, email these days looks much like your first scenario. Email is GMail and a few other large sites. Everybody else is a rounding error in statistics. For all intents and purposes these guys decide who can use email. Yes, they don't use a simple trusted list, but some secret Algorithm. The effect is the same (or maybe it's worse, since if the Algorithm doesn't like you, there's no one to ask to add you to the list). The security improvements you mention were more or less pushed onto others by Google and everybody was forced to implement them since if you can't talk to GMail you might as well as not exist in the SMTP world. > No company got more users or data when email protocols got encrypted This is speculation, but it's easy to see how these changes could have benefited big players: they already have the data. By forcing encryption on everyone they deny this information to others (like ISPs who might sniff the traffic). Also these security improvements increase the burden of maintenance of small mail servers, which again pushes more users towards big players. I'm not saying encrypting SMTP traffic didn't benefit the users, but reasons for forcing it on everyone might not have been completely altruistic.