On Thu, 2021-06-03 at 12:20 -0400, Bill Cole via mailop wrote: > On 2021-06-01 at 21:46:43 UTC-0400 (Tue, 01 Jun 2021 21:46:43 -0400) > yuv via mailop <post...@sfina.com> > is rumored to have said: > > > I do like the fact that if someone puts > > a letter with my address in a post office box anywhere in the > > world, > > it > > makes its way to my snail box within a reliable service standard. > > [...] > The direct corollary to that factoid is that all email should > therefore be run by government entities with nationwide monopolies.
No. Internet email suffers indeed a governance problem that result in interoperability or deliverability difficulties, but government monopolies are not the solution. Government's role is to set the rules and police them, not to provide the service that can be competitively provided by private enterprise. The corollary you envision is the phone network of the Seventies. Today, in advanced countries, the phone network is a more or less competitive market, that unlike internet email is *regulated* by government and *co-ordinated* at the ITU-T, a UN agency. I am not proposing that exact model (a license is required to operate a telecom and I rather see less red tape than more) but I am proposing that standards be enforced, and extended to include a sufficient level of deliverability. Today, "standards" are imposed by the big players, and they do so very much in the bad Microsoft way of the nineties: Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish. Internet email may not be extinguished any time soon, but it is becoming less and less relevant, replaced by SMS/MMS and other proprietary messaging platforms (iMessage, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.) that do not suffer the governance problems that come with the cacophonic fragmentation of internet email space where sender identification flaky and filtering is not only not standardized, but also spurious to a point of unreliability. > I do not expect this to garner much support by anyone currently > running any sort of commercial mail service on either end. Of course not. There is more money to be made in a world of deliverability issues and in the long term using deliverability as a way to squeeze out of the market the smaller players and aim for an oligopoly or even a monopoly, resulting in higher prices and less innovation. What volume of maiboxes is handled by the three biggest service providers in your country? Not talking free consumers services. It has been a long time since I have dealt with another business whose mailboxes were not handled by either Microsoft or Google. Choose your poison. Internet email in its pure form was/is a sore pain for profitability: there is an unlimited number of domains available (unlike the limited and controlled range of phone numbers or IP addresses) and barriers to entry were very low. Let's make them high by complicating things and we can make more money /s. -- Yuval Levy, JD, MBA, CFA Ontario-licensed lawyer _______________________________________________ mailop mailing list mailop@mailop.org https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
