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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

Running a mail server should be something anyone can do. And while this is cool, there are so many other problems to do it. It's the price we pay of letting big tech companies control so much of the virtual infrastructure: big tech has commoditized the internet so much into a platform for consumerism that it becomes a valuable target for spam.

In my opinion, the internet would be much better if none of the big players ever entered it, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc, and it would allow for many more decentralized and valuable commons like email.

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The main benefit of Gmail and other big providers is the anti-spam, anti-scam, "Google knows best" approach works really well.

When I last helped manage a mail server for a small business (late 2000's) SPAM was an absolute mess. You can really see why Azure etc has consumed on-premise Exchange.

The massive downside is they are the deciders of who gets through their gates, and if you're on their shitlist, goodluck.

On the other hand, if the main economic mechanisms that help the major players did not exist, we might not have so much spam in the first place.

>, if the main economic mechanisms that help the major players did not exist, we might not have so much spam in the first place.

Spam was a massive problem long before big tech existed.

- The old USENET network which was/is a federated ecosystem of servers run by universities etc was overrun with unwanted spam.

- Compuserve dialup network was blocking spam and they were also involved in a 1997 court case (1997 is a year before big tech like Google Inc existed in 1998.): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CompuServe_Inc._v._Cyber_Promo....

- the infamous "spam solutions" webpage that was a snarky attempt at "educating" people about fixing spam was created around February 2004 which was 2 months before Gmail service was introduced: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Other "small" areas of the internet are also universally hit with spam abuse:

- blogs that allowed "readers' comments and feedback" got inundated with spam and the blog owners added CAPTCHAS or disabled comments completely.

- small web forums like vBulletin and phpBB forums got hit with spam and admins put in "email signup and valid email verification link" workflows.

- even the newer modern decentralized communication networks like Nostr attract spam: https://old.reddit.com/r/nostr/comments/121ytwf/cutting_thro...

The existence of a big player like Gmail that was introduced in 2004 is not the reason for "so much spam".

Spam volume is always a problem on any communication network where the cost to create new identities is $0 and the cost to send messages is near $0.00. An extreme example of the opposite situation is Bloomberg Terminals chat system not having a spam problem. Why? Because it costs $25000 a year subscription to use. Bloomberg did recently "unbundle" their chat system for a lower price but the point is that the friction for new accounts is still high enough to deter spam abuse.

Tell me you weren't running an email server 20 years ago without telling me you weren't running an email server 20 years ago.

Safety and security is the best argument for monopolization and decreased freedom in general. It will always be a tradeoff. Fortunately a majority is typically more than happy with being fully patronized. The problem really starts if you are start being banned from infrastructure: e.g. see banking apps and 'safety net'. We are seeing the begining of a really dystopian world if regulators do not step in.

The problem with "more than happy" is that their happiness is measured in terms of chosing the local maximum of least bad. Moreover, that local maxima slowly changs over time to be worse and worse, so that people's happiness becomes a temporary sense of relief at having chosen the least bad option, which in the course of decades makes for a curtailing of freedoms that is far from true contentment.

I would also propose ease of use as a solution to our problems that the wolf in sheep's clothing took care of for us.

We basically handed over how we communicate to make it easier (Emails, Team Communication such as Slack/Teams, etc), essential internet infrastructure (Cloudflare, Amazon etc), banking, etc because it was easier..

My worst nightmare is somehow being locked out of my accounts, the only means is either emailing the CEO directly, posting on HN until it's hopefully solved or just moving to the country, and eat a lot of peaches.

In my experience rspamd has >99% accuracy which is enough for my personal email account. I don't doubt that Google does better though.

Awesome thanks, will check it out!

> The main benefit of Gmail and other big providers is the anti-spam, anti-scam, "Google knows best" approach works really well.

We've been spammed and scammed into thinking this is true. Sadly, Gmail is actually worse than competitors and especially worse than running your own email server.

The basic fact of the matter is that >99% of people will never be interested in hosting their own e-mail server, and that's okay.

This means we need organizations to host e-mail for people. In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization. So far, governments have been seemingly uninterested in going after the large e-mail providers for anticompetitive practices; maybe that should change. But as long as those anticompetitive practices only really affect individual hobbyists who wanna host their own e-mail, while business interests are unaffected, I don't see this changing.

I don't think it just affects hobbyists. It allows affects people who want to use smaller email servers, or even people who WOULD use smaller email servers simply because larger ones did not exist.

I think the government SHOULD go after consolidation such as Google, and that traditional anti-trust law is insufficient to combat the dangers of large tech companies.

This is precisely because traditional anti-trust laws only look after large PROPORTIONS. In today's modern economy, due to its size, we have a danger that we've never seen before: large ABSOLUTE size, which was never a problem in history as it is today.

Therefore, we need new laws that go after absolute size, as well as large proportions (traditional anti-trust).

> In a capitalist system, that means companies, and it leads to consolidation and monopolization.

No, a "capitalist system" does not lead to consolidation and monopolization.

That is true, but an unbridled capitalistic system that has relatively weak controls for protection of the commens DOES lead to such things frequently. I am not against capitalism, but against the form of capitalism we have today, which is focused on arbitrary and endless growth with relatively little controls to prevent pathologies like Google.

I'm not saying you are wrong, but it's maybe too early to describe Google as an example of "market failure" or "pathology".

One could debate if it's fair (or legal?) to let one side of the business (search ads) subsidise another (gmail) in order to crowd out competitors.

But that is neither an argument for or against "capitalism".

Then why does antitrust regulations have to exist?

[Citation needed]

I am a big fan of free markets, but the trend towards consolidation, at least in activities that profit from efficiencies of scale, is unmistakable, to the degree that it often kills the market unless prevented.

You probably cannot "consolidate" a market of book authors and musical bands, because quality of artistic expression does not scale with money. But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.

> But the market of publishers and recording companies is quite consolidated, because money buys more efficiency there.

Not quite. Publishing/recording depends on specific laws (intellectual property) to disable the competitive-market mechanisms. For example, copyright being extended to 95 years, but there are many other mechanisms surrounding copyrights that have enabled the current monopolies in publishing/recording.

> big tech has commoditized the internet so much into a platform for consumerism that it becomes a valuable target for spam.

What? Spam existed long before the big tech was around (admittedly the first Spam was probably from DEC, but before 'big internet tech' existed anyway) - it grew because of the amount of people/consumers on the internet. And credit where credits due: getting rid of spam was very time consuming until Google came out with one of the first effective filters.

> the internet would be much better if none of the big players ever entered it, including Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc,

How this could have been possible? Like there must have been some outside regulations in the late 90s/early 2000s. Maybe as an effect of the dotcom bubble?

Also it’s a good theory but doesn’t fit the capitalist picture at all.

There was no option due to lack of upload bandwidth for individuals at their home. And CGNAT.

If there had been significant populations with sufficient upload capacity, and ipv6, then there could have been a market for network devices that operated out of people’s homes under their own control.

Not that this would have ensured that big players would not exist, but it could have technically allowed a solution to be innovated.

The other option I can think of is a federal government provided email utility using post offices for identity verification and stiff penalties for spam/malware, to create a “trusted“ network, as opposed to using opaque processes from Google/Apple/Microsoft/Meta to create a “trusted” network.

For running mail you don’t need upload bandwidth, and in my country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn’t a thing. Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a month from many ISPs but not all.

20 years ago, and of course before then in the dialup age, your ISP operated your mail, so there was plenty of competition. Free at the point of use mail which meant you weren’t locked to a single ISP so there were benefits, but the big benefit was the unlimited space that the funding of companies like google allowed for, they could muscle in and knock out competition.

Eventually isps stopped providing as demand was tiny and the cost outweighed it. Same with things like nntp servers.

I pay a couple of quid a month to Zoho to provide my mail, off my own domain. Obviously I have static ip4 and 6 addresses from my ISP, but I’m happy to outsource as long as the cost is transparent and I’m not locked in, so I do. Part of that is to fund companies which are better armed to fight against monopolistic email practices than I am on my own.

There are other suppliers I can shift to by moving my MX records and updating a couple of TXTs, but there’s no need to at the moment.

> For running mail you don’t need upload bandwidth, and in my country certainly outside of mobile, CG nat isn’t a thing. Static IPs tend to cost a pound or two more a month from many ISPs but not all.

The thing is it cannot just be mail thing, to make it economically and time wise worth it. I can pay relatively little per month and have Apple/Google/Microsoft to take care of all of my needs, from email to file syncing to photo and phone backups, with the big risk that I can get arbitrarily locked out at any given moment.

But to offset this convenience, people would need an all in one, easy to setup, plug and play device that does it all. Something like a Synology NAS, where all they have to do is answer a few prompts about their domain and at most, swap in and out HDD when and if the disks or the NAS fail.

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