Email is hard to replace in a similar way that BGP, IP, UDP and other old protocol is hard to replace. One need to have everyone switch everything, including ha

Email is hard to replace in a similar way that BGP, IP, UDP and other old protocol is hard to replace. One need to have everyone switch everything, including hardware, at the same time in a coordinated fashion, and one also need to align incentives so that everyone agree that the money and time is worth the benefit of the new protocol. Close standards is not inherently different (people who work in telecom can likely attest to that), but closed standards has a higher probability to be owned by a single entity. A single entity has a much easier time to coordinated a switch with themselves, or align their own incentives with their own incentives. If you are alone or don't need to work with others, cooperation is trivial. Obviously, having everything owned by the same entity also has its drawback. If you don't like the new price, features, tracking and forced advertisements, well tough luck. While spam is an issue with email, I am not forced to wait 3 seconds and click "skip add" every time I read an email. I also don't need to pay per email, in contrast to sms. Email could had been much worse if it was a closed standard owned by a single entity.