If email was created today it would be one company and they would call it a platform. More than one company is trying to co-opt email in to their own app and do just this. May be it would be totally free at first but gradually exposure would decrease and eventually companies would have to pay to ensure that their customers saw their messages. If a gag order was attached with the backdoor, no debate would even happen.
This isn't an anti-business rant. Every tech company today has benefitted tremendously because of open standards - from Linux powering servers to http to the peering among internet providers. What if every free piece of the pie came at a cost?
There are a lot of funded tech companies right now creating free services in an attempt to grow their platforms as large as possible. Then, when they hit the critical mass of the network effect they either start charging or do something to cash in.
This means that the next generation of tools not only have the potential to "tax" the next generation of businesses for every little piece they have, but it also brings immense cross-border regulatory exposure increasing the risk of broken dependancies. What a different story it would be if the headline read "Brazilian judge orders mobile carriers to block the internet." We would all laugh.
The laughably tiny adoption of GPG, and even TLS between SMTP servers for that matter, should make it abundantly clear that voluntary extensions aren't good enough. A federated system which respects peers' "freedom" to not react adequately to a changing threat profile is somewhere between irresponsible and actively malicious to its end-users.
I, for one, celebrate the death of open standards like email in favor of mechanisms that can actually be improved (i.e. by forcing people to upgrade on pain of being locked out of the network) in response to new developments in security.
We need a whole generation full of such applications and services, all of which have no access to user data, so that jurisdictions get used to the idea that user data is owned by the users, and that there's no point in going after the service. And with enough such essential services woven into everyday life, it'll become less feasible or politically acceptable to attempt to block them.
Consider the very short list of countries that block Google, or YouTube, or Wikipedia, and what properties those countries have in common, versus the much larger set of countries making attacks on encryption right now. Consider the expected length of a political career in a reasonable country for someone who tried to block YouTube, versus the disturbing lack of backlash against attacks on encryption. We need to make attacking encryption a political third-rail.