That's helpful data, thank you. Sounds like it may depend on the service. (I'm genuinely shocked to see that many hotmail addresses, and can't help but wonder if there are correlations with other factors.)
Most people use Gmail because they want to, not because they have to. It's a free, superior product. Pretending voluntary preference is a monopoly is nonsense, but it is a very Mastodon-brained take.
One way monopolies form is by giving away something that others would have to charge money for.
Another way monopolies form is via exclusionary practices and the resulting impression that "things that aren't gmail are less reliable". (Anti-spam does not have to be exclusionary, and anti-spam is generally a good thing, but when it reliably sends smaller providers' mail to spam based solely on them being smaller providers, it is.)
Another way monopolies form is via social effects. "What's your gmail?", or people on first-tier technical support hearing you say an email address and assuming it's a gmail address and having to be corrected, and having never encountered one of those before.
Assuming any of those are "voluntary preference" is a take.
Try running your own SMTP server for a while. Gmail holds what appears to be monopoly power and uses it quite readily. Even ISPs with "free" customer email addresses aren't nearly as onerous as google is.
It's a figure of speech. I am not saying it is literally free. I'm being facitious. What I mean is they get money overwhelmingly because of their position in advertising and through android that essentially allows them to never worry about losing users. Who is going to going to attempt to delete their google account over poor customer service? You literally cannot access half of the internet today without a Google account.
There is a common misapprehension that the term "monopoly" can only be used when there a single supplier.
Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly : "In law, a monopoly is a business entity that has significant market power, that is, the power to charge overly high prices, which is associated with unfair price raises."
Or from Milton Freedman, "Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it". https://archive.org/details/capitalismfreedo0000frie/page/12...
In the post-Borkian interpretation of monopoly, adored by the rich and powerful because it enables market concentration which would otherwise be forbidden, consumer price is the main measure of control, hence free services can never be a monopoly.
Scholars have long pointed out Bork's view results from a flawed analysis of the intent of the Sherman Antitrust act. For example, Sherman wrote "If we would not submit to an emperor, we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.” (Emphasis mine. Widely quoted, original transcript at p2457 of https://www.congress.gov/bound-congressional-record/1890/03/... ). Freedman makes a similar point (see above) that a negative effect of a monopoly is to reduce access to alternatives.
In it she quotes Robert Pitofsky in "The Political Content of Antitrust":
"A third and overriding political concern is that if the free-market sector of the economy is allowed to develop under antitrust rules that are blind to all but economic concerns, the likely result will be an economy so dominated by a few corporate giants that it will be impossible for the state not to play a more intrusive role in economic affairs"
Even if you support the Borkian interpretation, you should still worry about the temptation for the US government to "play a more intrusive role" with GMail accounts. I strongly doubt Google will follow Lavabit's lead and shut down email should the feds come by with a gag order to turn over the company's private keys.
They aren't a monopoly, and especially not a monopoly on emails.
How did we get to the point where there can be 12 services, but the one with lots of customers is a "Monopoly". Its a complete destruction of the word. They aren't killing their competitors, nor making it illegal to compete. Yeah its harder in the current era to run your own mail server, for a variety of reasons involving spam. But can we just cut the shit on calling literally every company with more than 100 employees a Monopoly?
Most of the problems people have spinning up their own email servers, like getting blacklisted by the big boys, are less bad societally than actually accepting and routing the quantity of spam they are blacklisting. Does it benefit them? Kind of. But its not anticompetitive in any real sense. These restrictions are obvious and basic. If you really wanted to, you could spend a significant, but in the grand scheme of things small, amount of money to break into the same game.
I mean theres a non zero chance that if Google, Microsoft and Amazon stopped being so damn picky, the government would turn around and regulate that they do exactly what they are doing now, to resist the plague of spam that would result.
Its like getting mad at Visa and Mastercard for insisting on the PCI DSS for people they transact with. If it wasn't mandated by Visa and Mastercard, it would become government regulation (and is already referenced by regulators in some jurisdictions)
"Ooooh no Visa is being anticompetitive making me secure my environment and prove that security to a trusted third party what a terrible monopoly they have".
The point is that they don't provide the level of services required by their position, which is dominant.
When you have a legitimate problem with Google, they don't reply to you. The news here is again an example of that. The only thing you can do is abide by their rules, which often requires you to subscribe to their services or be at their mercy.
Thats the point? The point seems to dance around and shift every time I address it.
I have had this specific issue with an absolute laundry list of email providers and senders, including Google. Googles probably not even in the top ten worst offenders. Getting Sony to remove an ip from its PSN email blacklist was much more difficult.
So they are a monopoly in the sense that they aren't a monopoly, and just have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other email provider with a spam blacklist and that's uniquely bad somehow? Is that a good description?
Or will the point now shapeshift into something else?
Are you sure it's the point itself shapeshifting and not your responses to it?
> have massive corporate power, and that massive corporate power translates into them acting like every other [massive corporate] email provider with a spam blacklist
If that's how you want to sum it up, sure. Unaccountable corporate power is bad. That people instinctively reach for the "M-word" in response to this dynamic doesn't invalidate their criticisms. And no, I don't find your "if corpos didn't do this on their own then the government would force it" argument compelling. The problem isn't spam filtering (etc), but rather the details of how they're implemented.
No, they got it by Gmail being a loss leader paid by Google AdSense in the search engine. Now they have AdSense in Gmail directly, so I guess it pays for itself.
AT&T was once broken up and then after that you could connect a modem to a phone line. The whole public use of the Internet is a consequence of breaking up a “superior product” that became a bloated market incumbent resting on its laurels.
No, we should be mad at Google or any other BigTech taking over a big enough chunk of a federated system to basically dictate what can be sent/received and what not. With no human in the loop if you don't agree with their decisions.
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