[intransigent]

No. The premise of what if we only had a single monolithic email service, run by a single corporation as a public utility.

Not gmail specifically. Insert any named service into that role as placeholder. Yahoo, hotmail, gandi.net.

That entity becomes The One Ring, when they control the monopoly, and can read everyone's mail.

I would have thought my euphemism was obvious, but gee, I guess not.

[cyberpunk]

Oh, I'm just talking about how things work at the moment with tracking etc (source: I built a system which does this sort of thing on a decent scale).

Maybe we'll get to cyberpunk distopia you describe later tho :}

That 'what if', btw, is actual reality these days if you replace 'corporation' with 'government'.

While any given provider might get huge, the distributed nature of this thing we made really means the only folks who can realistically obtain the sort of 'total' power which such a monopoly would create are the state actors; and they're already doing this. We all watch the news, right?

It seems like we're talking about different things, or maybe I'm just not really getting your point. The problems we have are not this theoretical push towards massively powerful orgs (which is a thing, sure) -- but the govts which are inside all of these guys.

Either way, we're too late to do much about it I guess.

I'll be over there with the tinfoil hat and no social media accounts :P