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Aral Balkan has a blog post about taking small steps to end surveillance capitalism. In particular he focuses on the need for federated services. He points out that the move to re-decentralize the WWW is difficult and needs to start at the beginning, using a comparison of Apple's original computers to their latest generation of tablets as an illustration.
Five years ago, when I decided to devote myself to tackling the problem of surveillance capitalism, it was clear what we needed: convenient and beautiful ethical everyday things that provide seamless experiences1 on fully free-as-in-freedom stacks.
This is as true today as it was then and it will remain so. The only way to compete with unethical products built by organisations that have control over hardware + software + services is to create ethical organisations that have control over hardware + software + services and thus have at least the possibility to craft competitive experiences. We remove our eyes from this goal at our peril.
Related: Tim Berners-Lee Launches Inrupt, Aims to Create a Decentralized Web
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday December 11 2018, @04:10PM (1 child)
> But when is the last time someone invested hundreds of millions in an email provider?
Google must dump loads of money into gmail. Remember when having a gmail account was cool? When iphone was new and google announced email with unlimited (or it seemed so at the time) storage. Nowadays gmail is still the secondary reason why most people have a google account (with android being primary).
Spin it another way - google have repeatedly failed to sell google+ or whatever social network attempt. Why? Because it's like facebook but crappier. Now, everyone knows facebook is evil, many care but are too locked in to do anything about it. Offer a non-locked-in service, like gmail, and people will flock to it; they win kudos with the techy crowd (who brief the media, who brief the public). And let's face it, how many people have migrated away from gmail? They can get more users/ads revenue at the same time. It's a no-brainer and someone in Google should do it.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday December 11 2018, @05:29PM
Eh...gmail was popular initially because it was legitimately that much better. I used to switch email accounts about once a year, shuffling around to find who was offering the most storage this year. 2MB accounts to 5MB to 10MB to 20MB...and then all of a sudden someone starts offering 1GB plus? Of course I switched. And now I've switched to my own server, because gmail kinda sucks these days too.
The thing is...Google invests in gmail as a loss leader. It's a great way to get people to register a Google account, which then pushes them towards other Google services in the future. Nobody is investing in gmail for the sake of gmail, and nobody really expects gmail to be profitable all by itself. But the battle to control email is already lost, so they try to monopolize the market as best they can so they can utilize that for surveillance efforts which can then bolster their other, more locked-in services.
As I said before, nobody is investing in email. People might invest in closed ecosystems of which email is a part, but nobody invests in email itself.