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> This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just gro

> This is like staying you should stop trusting the supermarket to not poison your food and to instead trust the smaller supermarket to not do it or to just grow your own food. More like, have alternatives ready and know what to do to avoid downtime if your main supermarket randomly permabans you for accidentally losing a receipt between purchase and exit, or having unaccounted for bottle of coke in your backpack that you bought at another store, or just looking sus. Or yes maybe it's found to be poisoning food. Fairly reasonable to be prepared. > Email is a utility and should be regulated like one. I want less barriers to operating my own email if I want it, having to get a license and such is the opposite of the goal. Maybe that's not what you mean though. Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition.

tsimionescu 4y ago
> Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition. How is this relevant when discussing Gmail of all things? When was the last time they had an actual competitor with some market share (outside corporate email), Yahoo! Mail?
- throwaway290 4y ago
  are you aware how legislation works? you regulate a category as a whole, not randomly pick a specific company and write laws just for it. if you regulate alphabet in particular, that would send everyone a message that this is now the "officially approved" provider. no others are regulated, after all! it would only increase the barrier to competition. competition is a good thing. currently, thanks to email+DNS being open protocols, there are no barriers to operating e-mail for your own domain or providing it as a service. as a result, plenty of profitable providers (fastmail, aws) between which users can seamlessly switch.

tsimionescu 4y ago

> Generally regulating anything is a tradeoff. It helps established monopolies and prevents competition. How is this relevant when discussing Gmail of all things? When was the last time they had an actual competitor with some market share (outside corporate email), Yahoo! Mail?

throwaway290 4y ago
are you aware how legislation works? you regulate a category as a whole, not randomly pick a specific company and write laws just for it. if you regulate alphabet in particular, that would send everyone a message that this is now the "officially approved" provider. no others are regulated, after all! it would only increase the barrier to competition. competition is a good thing. currently, thanks to email+DNS being open protocols, there are no barriers to operating e-mail for your own domain or providing it as a service. as a result, plenty of profitable providers (fastmail, aws) between which users can seamlessly switch.