Not to accuse any one person specifically of anything nefarious, but I do find the historical timing of these articles bemoaning self-hosting of email rather odd.
Currently, there are only a handful of large technology companies in control of most of the world's inbox. Google is the first that comes to mind. At the same time we've just had some of our most highly publicized hearings involving these tech companies (facebook and google) as well as our first hearing on cryptocurrency and the larger web3 infrastructure. There is a rising public awareness and therefore political will to regulate these technologies and companies. This would formally fold google and the like into the USG despite their long standing less formal arrangements with the intelligence agencies.
The one way to make this regulation and upcoming legislation moot? Decentralization by any other name. Self-hosting of email servers, or distributed computing and storage with web3. Perhaps its is only my latent paranoia, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the glut of the 'don't bother hosting your own email server' sentiment is, at least in part, artificially amplified in order for the coming formal regulations to have more of an impact.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if google themselves was helping to facilitate this in order to steer conversation towards stalling any potential competitors as a part of the new regulatory framework. It is for instance a lot easier to argue that outlawing self-hosting of email servers (or requiring a license to do so) makes a lot more sense if you can point to a 'general public sentiment' that hosting your own email server is 'too complicated' and 'less useful' and 'less secure' and therefore would only be done by antisocial actors such as 'criminal elements' and 'terrorists'.
Seeing as we are at the cusp of a new distributed infrastructure movement, all this feels like preemptive damage control to me.
Currently, there are only a handful of large technology companies in control of most of the world's inbox. Google is the first that comes to mind. At the same time we've just had some of our most highly publicized hearings involving these tech companies (facebook and google) as well as our first hearing on cryptocurrency and the larger web3 infrastructure. There is a rising public awareness and therefore political will to regulate these technologies and companies. This would formally fold google and the like into the USG despite their long standing less formal arrangements with the intelligence agencies.
The one way to make this regulation and upcoming legislation moot? Decentralization by any other name. Self-hosting of email servers, or distributed computing and storage with web3. Perhaps its is only my latent paranoia, but I can't help but shake the feeling that the glut of the 'don't bother hosting your own email server' sentiment is, at least in part, artificially amplified in order for the coming formal regulations to have more of an impact.
It wouldn't surprise me at all if google themselves was helping to facilitate this in order to steer conversation towards stalling any potential competitors as a part of the new regulatory framework. It is for instance a lot easier to argue that outlawing self-hosting of email servers (or requiring a license to do so) makes a lot more sense if you can point to a 'general public sentiment' that hosting your own email server is 'too complicated' and 'less useful' and 'less secure' and therefore would only be done by antisocial actors such as 'criminal elements' and 'terrorists'.
Seeing as we are at the cusp of a new distributed infrastructure movement, all this feels like preemptive damage control to me.