Re: [Fwd: I-D Action: draft-carpenter-prismatic-reflections-00.txt]

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Sunday, 22 September, 2013 07:02 -0400 Noel Chiappa
<[e-mail]> wrote:

>...
> Yes. $$$. Nobody makes much/any money off email because it is
> so de-centralized. People who build wonderful new applications
> build them in a centralized way so that they can control them.
> And they want to control them so that they can monetize them.

That is even true of the large email providers who are happy to
provide "free" email in return for being able leverage their
other products and/or "sell" the users and user base to
advertisers.

And people, including, I've noticed, a lot of IETF participants,
go along.  Email is, in practice, a lot more centralized than it
was ten or 15 years ago and is at risk of getting more, not only
as more users migrate but as those providers decide it is easier
to trust only each other.  With DKIM, increasing use of
blacklists, and other things, the latter may be better (from a
distributed environment standpoint) than it was a half-dozen
years ago, but I'm concerned that the pattern may be cyclic with
new domains providing new challenges and incentives for "trust
those you know already" models.

   john