4 ms·

It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only

It honestly is a bit dissapointing that most of the internet's "infrastructure" is tied up in large corporations that just get money for free by being the only provider and face little to no backlash (because of their monopoly) when they neglect things like basic customer service.

unmole 6mo ago
> get money for free How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?
- ranger_danger 6mo ago
  Advertising and eyeballs, I'd assume
- noobermin 6mo ago
  A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.
  - protocolture 6mo ago
    They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails. How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    - mindslight 6mo ago
      Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.
      - protocolture 6mo ago
        But theres not even that going on. Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game. I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result. Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions) "Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
        xeyownt 6mo ago
        You are missing the point. The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant. When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
        protocolture 6mo ago
        Thats the point? The point seems to dance around and shift every time I address it. I have had this specific issue with an absolute laundry list of email providers and senders, including Google. Googles probably not even in the top ten worst offenders. Getting Sony to remove an ip from its PSN email blacklist was much more difficult. So they are a monopoly in the sense that they aren't a monopoly, and just have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other email provider with a spam blacklist and that's uniquely bad somehow? Is that a good description? Or will the point now shapeshift into something else?
  - unmole 6mo ago
    Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader > ridiculous assertion. What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
    - noobermin 6mo ago
      It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
      - ranger_danger 6mo ago
        > You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account. This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
      - unmole 6mo ago
        [flagged]
    - themafia 6mo ago
      Try running your own SMTP server for a while. Gmail holds what appears to be monopoly power and uses it quite readily. Even ISPs with "free" customer email addresses aren't nearly as onerous as google is.
    - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
      > Gmail is not a monopoly. https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491 https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491 > For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address. > In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
- bmandale 6mo ago
  >How do they get money for free? market power >What is stopping everyone else from doing the same? see above
  - unmole 6mo ago
    Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?
    - darkwater 6mo ago
      No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.
      - unmole 6mo ago
        So, Google built a superior product that is profitable and we are supposed to be mad about this?
        darkwater 6mo ago
        No, we should be mad at Google or any other BigTech taking over a big enough chunk of a federated system to basically dictate what can be sent/received and what not. With no human in the loop if you don't agree with their decisions.
        throwaway173738 6mo ago
        AT&T was once broken up and then after that you could connect a modem to a phone line. The whole public use of the Internet is a consequence of breaking up a “superior product” that became a bloated market incumbent resting on its laurels.
    - deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
subroutine 6mo ago
Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?
- nomel 6mo ago
  I don't know if it's that simple. As a litmus test, try to set up your own mail server. See how many milliseconds it takes for it to be blacklisted by gmail. And then observe the response time for their support, when you try to clear up the confusion that google has about your intentions.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Arnt 6mo ago
    I run my own mail server, not blacklisted. Now I'm a bit of a special case, I know mail well. But when a moderately technical colleague wanted to do the same, I told her to use Mox, she set it up and Gmail doesn't block her either. So... would you please elaborate?
    - dwedge 6mo ago
      I find there are three peopls who comment about hosting email. A small group like us who set it up correctly and never have problems. A larger group who set it up but get the dns wrong and warn people not to. And a third bigger group who never tried but listen to the second group and always comment that you'll have 1% deliverability
      - ssl-3 6mo ago
        It is different than it once was. It was dead-nuts simple in the 1990s: Just learn enough about DNS to put in an MX record that points to an A record, get sendmail working, and have it begin delivering mail. The end. (Open relay? No spam filter? No virus scanning? No nothin'? Yeah, that kind of was the style at the time...) It's got a lot more steps today, but it's still do-able. Operationally, keeping a mail server online and treated well just takes one or two people to spend a little bit of time occasionally to stay proactively ahead of new expectations and requirements instead of reacting to them after things change. It also helps if Carla, from marketing, doesn't wake up one day and decide to spam the entire customer list without asking for guidance first. Maybe I should have put some automatic mitigation into place for that, but whatever: We chatted about that and it never happened again. (Or at least, I find that to be true with smaller companies. Bigger ones obviously may require more elaborate systems to handle more volume and/or provide better uptime. But the requirements of keeping the reputation up are about the same regardless of scale, and that still only takes one or two people to pay attention to things sometimes. [And the only reason two might be required is in case one of them gets hit by a bus.])

unmole 6mo ago

> get money for free How do they get money for free? What is stopping everyone else from doing the same?

ranger_danger 6mo ago
Advertising and eyeballs, I'd assume
noobermin 6mo ago
A monopoly. It's hard for "everyone else" to develop a monopoly today, to suggest otherwise is a ridiculous assertion.
- protocolture 6mo ago
  They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails. How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - mindslight 6mo ago
    Postel's law means you can just mentally replace "monopoly" with "anticompetitive restraint of trade" and go on to address the substantive point.
    - protocolture 6mo ago
      But theres not even that going on. Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game. I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result. Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions) "Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
      - xeyownt 6mo ago
        You are missing the point. The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant. When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
        protocolture 6mo ago
        Thats the point? The point seems to dance around and shift every time I address it. I have had this specific issue with an absolute laundry list of email providers and senders, including Google. Googles probably not even in the top ten worst offenders. Getting Sony to remove an ip from its PSN email blacklist was much more difficult. So they are a monopoly in the sense that they aren't a monopoly, and just have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other email provider with a spam blacklist and that's uniquely bad somehow? Is that a good description? Or will the point now shapeshift into something else?
- unmole 6mo ago
  Gmail is not a monopoly. When it comes to actual paying customers, it is not even the market leader > ridiculous assertion. What is ridiculous is the idea that running an email service a massive scale like Gmail is somehow free.
  - noobermin 6mo ago
    It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
    - ranger_danger 6mo ago
      > You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account. This must be the half I have never heard of then. What non-google websites specifically require a google account?
    - unmole 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  - themafia 6mo ago
    Try running your own SMTP server for a while. Gmail holds what appears to be monopoly power and uses it quite readily. Even ISPs with "free" customer email addresses aren't nearly as onerous as google is.
  - JoshTriplett 6mo ago
    > Gmail is not a monopoly. https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491 https://pdx.social/@evergreensewing/116388477430172491 > For the first time since we started the company back in January/February, we have a customer who does NOT use Gmail for their email address. > In case you wanted to see what a monopoly looks like.
bmandale 6mo ago
>How do they get money for free? market power >What is stopping everyone else from doing the same? see above
- unmole 6mo ago
  Nice circular reasoning you got there. How do they have market power? Did they get it for free?
  - darkwater 6mo ago
    No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.
    - unmole 6mo ago
      So, Google built a superior product that is profitable and we are supposed to be mad about this?
      - darkwater 6mo ago
        No, we should be mad at Google or any other BigTech taking over a big enough chunk of a federated system to basically dictate what can be sent/received and what not. With no human in the loop if you don't agree with their decisions.
      - throwaway173738 6mo ago
        AT&T was once broken up and then after that you could connect a modem to a phone line. The whole public use of the Internet is a consequence of breaking up a “superior product” that became a bloated market incumbent resting on its laurels.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]

subroutine 6mo ago

Gmail is free. How much customer support resources should someone reasonably expect a company to dedicate towards their free-of-charge services?

nomel 6mo ago
I don't know if it's that simple. As a litmus test, try to set up your own mail server. See how many milliseconds it takes for it to be blacklisted by gmail. And then observe the response time for their support, when you try to clear up the confusion that google has about your intentions.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- Arnt 6mo ago
  I run my own mail server, not blacklisted. Now I'm a bit of a special case, I know mail well. But when a moderately technical colleague wanted to do the same, I told her to use Mox, she set it up and Gmail doesn't block her either. So... would you please elaborate?
  - dwedge 6mo ago
    I find there are three peopls who comment about hosting email. A small group like us who set it up correctly and never have problems. A larger group who set it up but get the dns wrong and warn people not to. And a third bigger group who never tried but listen to the second group and always comment that you'll have 1% deliverability
    - ssl-3 6mo ago
      It is different than it once was. It was dead-nuts simple in the 1990s: Just learn enough about DNS to put in an MX record that points to an A record, get sendmail working, and have it begin delivering mail. The end. (Open relay? No spam filter? No virus scanning? No nothin'? Yeah, that kind of was the style at the time...) It's got a lot more steps today, but it's still do-able. Operationally, keeping a mail server online and treated well just takes one or two people to spend a little bit of time occasionally to stay proactively ahead of new expectations and requirements instead of reacting to them after things change. It also helps if Carla, from marketing, doesn't wake up one day and decide to spam the entire customer list without asking for guidance first. Maybe I should have put some automatic mitigation into place for that, but whatever: We chatted about that and it never happened again. (Or at least, I find that to be true with smaller companies. Bigger ones obviously may require more elaborate systems to handle more volume and/or provide better uptime. But the requirements of keeping the reputation up are about the same regardless of scale, and that still only takes one or two people to pay attention to things sometimes. [And the only reason two might be required is in case one of them gets hit by a bus.])