In the real world, reputation matters and some people don't want to talk to you unless someone can vouch for you.
This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate.
These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.
And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.
> This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate.
They have that power specifically people people outsource vetting of whether someone's worth dealing with. I'll repeat, this is all about reputation, and how without reputation you're subject to every anonymous person's abuse. That's not an issue when the total number of people you're dealing with is manageable. It is when the number of people you expect to have to deal with is the population of a small country or the entire world.
> And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
Only for those that opted into that system. Gmail does not dictate what mail servers accept your mail, they dictate whether they themselves accept your mail. They just happen to have a userbase in hundreds of millions billions, so a large percent of the people you might want to contact use it. You can blame Gmail all you want, but they're just doing what their users want, which is reliable email without much spam, and that's how they've achieved it. You're not going to get far telling people when you send stuff to them they're required to accept it. The system only worked the way you wanted it when it was small and offenders weren't as anonymous and social punishments worked against them. When everyone's mostly anonymous, that no longer works.
> Do you really not see why this is a problem?
It is a problem, but it's a problem of people choosing to use them. And there's been ways to keep people from reading your emails for decades at this point with GPG, and if you can't trust the other side to buy into that, or to not use a web based email client, then there's nothing you can do about communication with those people anyway.
Should they be monitoring email? No. Would we be better with laws preventing that? Yes. Is that really the same issue as them being so large that by dictating who they will talk with and how they are effectively dictating rules for running a public mail server? No. Separate issues.
> Only for those that opted into that system. (...) You can blame Gmail all you want, but they're just doing what their users want, which is reliable email without much spam
That's not true. When you use Gmail you don't opt-in to a setting to "automatically send smaller non-commercial providers to the SPAM folder". Gmail is pretty bad at SPAM handling you still receive lots of commercial advertisement from "reputable" sources, you just don't see the non-scammy non-phishy email you were expecting.
In this specific instance, Gmail is not the worst out there. They're very protective but from what i heard you can get allowlisted in a matter of weeks of harassing their tech support. Meanwhile, Microsoft is a lost cause if you want to get your mail through to an Outlook mailbox...
They have that power specifically people people outsource vetting of whether someone's worth dealing with.
People outsource that vetting? What choice did those people have?
If there is a small cabal of tech giants dominating email distribution, and a user's choices are between some of those giants that are essentially as bad as each other and some smaller competitors that might be better in terms of delivering incoming mail reliably but are frozen out by the cabal in terms of delivering outgoing mail reliably instead, there is no meaningful choice or consent about having this filtering done to their incoming mail. It is a situation imposed upon them by the tech firms.
This has absolutely nothing to do with someone not wanting to talk to someone else. It has everything to do with some third party having the power to decide whether the other two may communicate.
These days it's all so centralized in a few very large players that they really likely just talk to each other.
And thus the single most important method of remote communication in the world today, the method that is frequently akin to root access to our online lives, became subject to arbitrary monitoring and interference by huge, powerful organisations with their own interests and negligible regulatory oversight, legal safeguards or accountability to anyone but their shareholders.
Do you really not see why this is a problem? You talk about the internet matching the real world, but in the real world we've had laws against monitoring and interference with things like postal mail and telephone calls for a very long time almost everywhere.