4 ms·

Disagree. Google, Facebook, and Apple only seem like entrenched behemoths because this community grew up with them, and it's hard to imagine a world without the

• EMIRELADERO 4y ago
  > But make no mistake, they're just as fragile as every other Standard Oil that's ever existed. You realize that Standard Oil was broken up by the courts through the Sherman Act, which is precisely the type of regulatory action you're arguing against, right?
  • dymk 4y ago
    No, the "precise" regulatory action being suggested was not breaking Google up, it was regulating account deletion.
    • EMIRELADERO 4y ago
      What I meant by "regulatory action" was "law passed by legislature and enforced by courts through public/private rights of action"
• notch656a 4y ago
  Aight, I paid for an e-mail service and now I had to sign the same agreement as google except I had to pay on top of that. What exactly can I sue them for that I couldn't sue google for? If I run my own server what fraction of clients and customers will actually get my mail rather than it being auto-filtered out as spam?
  • dymk 4y ago
    You're not paying Google anything. You know what they owe you? Nothing. You pay Company X to host your email, and you enter into a service agreement. They kick your account off. If they're in violation of the service agreement, now you actually have a case against them. They know this. Their legal council knows this.
    • notch656a 4y ago
      Company X sent me the same service agreement as google, that basically said pay us and we promise absolutely nothing and we don't promise you'll actually get e-mail either. The only difference is I pay on top of that.
      • dymk 4y ago
        Find Company Y then. There's literally thousands of email providers to choose from. Take your pick.
    • robbrown451 4y ago
      They operate as a corporation in the United States and are subject to its laws. They owe what the law says they do. And the laws can be changed. Feel free to vote for people who think companies can do as they please just because you aren't directly paying for them (even though they make money off you), I'll vote for other people.
    • rightbyte 4y ago
      Handing out free goods does not excuse malicius intent, like sabotage.
• smt88 4y ago
  > But make no mistake, they're just as fragile as every other Standard Oil that's ever existed. It's ironic that you chose Standard Oil as an example. It was an unbeatable monopoly that was broken up by govt regulation, not by competition. You're arguing against your own position. > Pay for an email service, and sue if you incur damages due to them terminating your service. You always sign away this right when using a commercial email service. Their terms of use allow them to terminate your account with impunity. > Or run your own email server if you care to. This is a very 1990s understanding of the email ecosystem. It's almost impossible to start a new email service today because the big players (primarily Google and Microsoft) won't trust you and will silently refuse to deliver your emails. Sometimes you will be blanket banned, sometimes you'll just have a few missing here or there. Because the email market is dominated by so few players, they have complete control over the ecosystem. Even if you choose your email service, your recipients will have chosen one of the big players 99.999% of the time, meaning you're also playing by their rules.
• cma 4y ago
  Was Standard Oil really that fragile? From Wikipedia: > Its history as one of the world's first and largest multinational corporations ended in 1911, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it was an illegal monopoly. Seems like it was broken up by the government and not due to competition.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  > Or run your own email server if you care to. Only to find your mail blackholed by said behemoths because your counterparty uses them.