I would love to see some sane, email 2.0 standards like the author talks about.
But, email is only decentralized in theory. In reality, email was fully captured a decade ago by a monopoly of 2 particular inbox providers.
In consumer, Google has a defacto monopoly and runs the show. In B2B, Microsoft has a defacto monopoly and runs the show.
Nothing can change without Google or Microsoft making the move first. And neither of these companies have any interest in changing/improving anything, given they already have a monopoly in their respective corner of the market.
What we need first, is to lower switching costs to open up the market again. This could mean making DNS less of a nightmare so domain-based email becomes easy again. This could mean a government mandate that your email address (like a phone number) must be allowed easy transfer to other providers (Since Google owns the Gmail.com domain, they own your "phone number" in a sense). Etc. Etc.
Imagine if Google and Microsoft owned your physical mailbox...and they decided what type of letters you could receive from who...and they sold ad-space in it. That's essentially what we've done with our digital mailboxes.
> And neither of these companies have any interest in innovating
I don’t think this is true, or at least I think they have a strong interest in standardizing. Enterprise and personal users are routinely frustrated with Outlook and Gmail for dumb UI problems which are largely due to a lack of standardization. The only solution requires collective action. In addition, a well-written technical specification outsources a lot of difficult or highly specific questions to a committee of experts (kind of like how the C specification is an excellent technical manual, or K&R was a good de facto specification).
Gmail and Outlook both have market lock-in on personal / business email because of how their email clients integrate with other personal / business software. (Gmail is also given a hand by rational consumer apathy; Gmail is fine and free, changing email addresses is a pain.) I don’t think either company would gain or lose any competitive advantage by standardizing things around email itself. But it would probably reduce a lot of technical management headaches.
> What we need first, is a government mandate that your email address (like a phone number) must be allowed easy transfer to other providers. As long as Google owns the Gmail.com domain, they will be able to hold the entire network hostage.
A mandate is perhaps heavy handed, but a statement that the government will no longer communicate via e-mail and only via protocol X would be appropriate.
As for the email transfer... that would certainly have to be a new protocol. There is no mechanism to do anything of the sort today. the @... part literally means @ that server.
Enterprise and regulated communications can break any monopoly if the money/legislators agree that an alternative is better. Let’s say, EU issues a directive that certain types of communications must adhere some requirements which email v1 cannot implement. It will automatically create the market for email v2 and v1-to-v2 gateways. Or Salesforce and Meta agree on a new protocol for CRM comms, that brings more trust to email v2 campaigns, because SF can certify senders and Meta recipients.
But, email is only decentralized in theory. In reality, email was fully captured a decade ago by a monopoly of 2 particular inbox providers.
In consumer, Google has a defacto monopoly and runs the show. In B2B, Microsoft has a defacto monopoly and runs the show.
Nothing can change without Google or Microsoft making the move first. And neither of these companies have any interest in changing/improving anything, given they already have a monopoly in their respective corner of the market.
What we need first, is to lower switching costs to open up the market again. This could mean making DNS less of a nightmare so domain-based email becomes easy again. This could mean a government mandate that your email address (like a phone number) must be allowed easy transfer to other providers (Since Google owns the Gmail.com domain, they own your "phone number" in a sense). Etc. Etc.
Imagine if Google and Microsoft owned your physical mailbox...and they decided what type of letters you could receive from who...and they sold ad-space in it. That's essentially what we've done with our digital mailboxes.