I think we are living in a time when companies are being frequently trusted. Because when they claim that mergers reduce costs, the automatic thought is the cost will trickle to the consumer.
The other outcome we are eager to see is the innovation that occurs at the extra large scale level. Do we see the more robots make it in to industry? Or intensive AI? The opportunities and imaginations have exploded after Facebook and Google utilized their dominance for the greater good.
Lastly, enforcement against unethical illegal behavior has become easier. Reducing the need of cynical and paranoid reasons to prohibit mergers. Only when there is actual concern of legal unethical actions negatively causing market consolidation and preventing startup incubation, the FTC will not be doing any of the things the paranoid want it to do.
Highlights:
“It’s extremely odd for the FTC to operate with only two commissioners for this long,” antitrust attorney Reed Freeman told the National Law Journal. And even more so when the two commissioners are essentially lame ducks.
“The Justice Department’s antitrust division is doing stuff,” said Matt Stoller, a fellow with the Open Markets Institute, a leading antagonist of the tech platforms. “Ajit Pai is a bad man, but the [Federal Communications Commission] is doing stuff. The FTC’s silence is embarrassing.”
“The FTC really hasn’t used its authority in decades and has tried to rein in its own authority,” said Sandeep Vaheesan, a regulatory counsel for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Let me just reply instead of downvoting.
It is clear from a slew of radical movements by the new US administration that it has contempt for consumers and has zero interest in enforcing existing laws against big corporations. It's all about growth at all costs, and government agencies that have explicit charters to protect consumers, the environment, and the marketplace, have been or are in the process of being gutted.
You're being downvoted because you labeled everyone who offers resistance to mergers as paranoid and cynical. That's perjorative and unhelpful. Very many people have valid reasons for being distrustful of big, unrestrained corporations. Reasons based on a long track record of them stomping on consumers and their employees.
You reply to a comment and say it is pejorative and unhelpful but then politicize your own response as well. Your paragraph here is equally unhelpful.
Please explain how trickle-down nonsense can work when the cost is already zero.
No, the cost benefits will go to investors. That's why the investors approve the merger.
Email is a foundational technology within the business space. It exists in common formats, with slow-changing protocols widely compatible with their forbears, and similar across the marketplace. It is the deep, slow-moving tectonic plate on which we build a myriad of other business. It is a (largely) immutable record agreed to across a range of servers. Sure we can resend an email to a customer, but we can't edit the email they have already received. It is trusted, and it is shared.
I have no problem with an app that makes reading emails easier, something which combines long threads of back and forth argument into a simple list of shared understanding, but it is important that all that back-and-forth exists because, years from now, we might want to know how we reached that consensus. We might want to know those rationalisations.
With AMP-for-email we might just need to rely on Google's slick design and their simple response of "Don't worry about why you agreed, just trust us that you did."
I agree. I think it is worth considering the concept of Shearing Layers [1] - where successful artefacts (buildings, systems, organisations) tend to be composed of layers that change at different rates, and this confers stability and adaptability. Layers that change rapidly (tech-mediated culture, web technology, etc) need lower layers that move slower (net infrastructure, http, email, etc.)
I'm curious to know if you have also examined Posteo, Mailbox, Tutanota and ProtonMail in this respect. At least the first two of those seem to be handling things quite well while charging a fraction of what Fastmail charges (per mailbox). Posteo has many other things going for it on the social responsibility, privacy and ethical angles. I haven't seen another email provider match that.
OTOH, I like that Posteo is not a corporation, but actually run by a natural person with full personal liability.
_____
> Can I use Posteo with my own domains?
> No. We are an email provider with a particular, privacy-oriented model – and this is not compatible with incorporating own domains. One of our emphases is data economy: we do not collect any user information (names, addresses, etc) of our customers. We always answer requests from authorities for user information in the negative. On the other hand, own domains need to be registered to the name and address of a person. If you were able to use own domains with us, this would affect the entire concept of Posteo: we would need to start saving user information for all customers who use their own domains with us – and to provide these to the Federal Network Agency to be provided on request to the authorities.
> Even if only the MX record pointed to us, we would still need to store the assignment of the domain in your Posteo account as user information. Thus we would possess your user information and be required to give it out. For this reason, we have decided not to offer this possibility and instead to use data economy. We certainly understand that having your own domain is very important in the commercial industries, but from our privacy-oriented perspective, the disadvantages prevail. It is, however, possible to add various other email addresses with external domains as senders in the webmail interface and thereby to send emails with Posteo using external domains. In order to be able to read replies to these messages, you need to set up forwarding to Posteo for the external address.
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Also please see its stance on privacy [2], where it emphasizes minimizing the data collected from the customer.
This has got to be bollocks, right? Always?
If they're served a warrant or subpoenaed or whatever the correct legal procedure is called, they're going to have to comply, right? And all they need is an IP address and you're hosed... unless you're taking multiple other steps to hide.
If I put my TFH (Tin Foil Hat) on, anyone who uses language that strongly is probably a CIA front.
WPUASTSWSWYOGTUO
But to you point, my primary motivation in this instance was dramatic effect. Additionally, I'm hoping it will catch on.
The lock-in provided by not using a custom domain is very convenient.
How is storing the domain part of the mail address so very different from storing the local part?
> On the other hand, own domains need to be registered to the name and address of a person. If you were able to use own domains with us, this would affect the entire concept of Posteo: we would need to start saving user information for all customers who use their own domains with us – and to provide these to the Federal Network Agency to be provided on request to the authorities.
They don't want to be put in the position where they know what natural person a certain email belongs to.
I get and respect that they want to provide a way to use their service without identifying yourself, but stopping a customer from voluntarily identifying themselves is fairly futile, and counter to how many people intend to use e-mail. (Indeed, they offer payment by bank transfer or paypal, so clearly they do not insist on full privacy)
Well, luckily they have direct competitors that offer the full range, so while I'd love more players in this segment I'm not directly affected by them not wanting such customers (and I find the argument questionable enough to reconsider recommending them in the future)
While I'm sure that we would have to take certain things with a pinch of salt, since Germany is a Fourteen Eyes country, for me this amount of attention is something I haven't seen elsewhere (and not at this price). As I mentioned above, the social responsibility and other factors also heavily influenced me when I did the switch to Posteo.
From the FAQ: [1]
> "How can Posteo be anonymous, when I’m paying by bank transfer or PayPal?
> Credit is always added to your Posteo account anonymously – regardless of whether you pay by bank transfer, PayPal, credit card or in cash. We do not attach the data we receive with payments to the email accounts. We developed our own system for this in 2009, with which all payment processes are anonymised.
> The payment system is the core of our concept of data reduction, above all, because we keep payment information strictly separate from our customers' email accounts, we do not attach any user information to the accounts – and can thereby ensure the fundamentally anonymous use of our email service. You can find out in detail how the anonymisation of payment processes occurs at Posteo on our payment info page."
It's neither the user's wish, nor the company as the company most certainly wants user feedback. Your post quite literally is only there to satisfy yourself.
Just as a rhetorical question: do they decline local parts in the form of firstname.lastname? Thought so.
Sounds like a BS marketing answer.
I've been using the same email address with my provider from Berlin, Germany for the past 20 years and there has never been any problem with it . They also have a working webmail interface, and I doubt they're very exceptional. There are also reliable free email providers that work very well for the past 20 years or longer, e.g. German gmx comes to my mind.
It will take you a few months to fix all those problems and even then it could be that some email provider decides to put new requirements in place.
Most of these are alleged to have some purpose in preventing spam, but I think experience doesn't bear that out. They may prevent Joe jobs[1], and it may be reasonable to use the suspicion they create of a message being forged as one factor in deciding if a message is spam. But nothing really deals with spam except statistical analysis of messages.
The real point is that the major providers are anticompetative, and that's not really the fault of email as such.
But good look getting through to postmaster@gmail|outlook etc.
But they'll hold you to some arbitrary standard that's supposed to mean "less spam" when they should have more than enough traffic to get by with statistical/ml methods anyway... /rant
DKIM+SPF+DMARC means you can prevent anyone else from impersonating your domain.
Every MTA will reject mails that violate the DMARC policy you specify in your DNS, if you have any.
All the old From: [email protected] scams are gone, impossible.
This means spammers either have to use hacked servers, or their real From: address.
And as soon as they have to use their real From: address, it becomes trivial to block spam.
Blocking spam is only so hard because From: was basically meaningless until now.
It's not like impersonation is dead. When I signed up for the Gmail roll-out, [email protected] was reserved, but you can email me at [email protected] - a poor Norwegian translation equivalent. More importantly, I can email you from that address, and tell you there's a problem with your account, could you please verify that your password is "hunter2", if not email your current password so we can verify that your account is secure (not that I ever have, or will, I got the account for a laugh).
Federated trust (s/mime) or Web of trust/direct trust(gpg) secures email. All this domain pseudo secure dns nonsense... I'm not sure I accept it's better than static analysis.
If I get email from [email protected], then I now know it's from example.tld. If the mail is spam, I can ask example.tld to block alice, or I can simply blacklist example.tld.
The important part in this is spam prevention, and that if I get an email from @paypal.com, knowing that it's real.
What you're complaining about is another question, but not really relevant. Google always uses @google.com for employees, and if you get an email from that, it's real.
This is about enforcing identification, not verification, security, trust, or anything else.
Is this better than graylist+whitelist? Is it better than content based filtering? I'm not convinced.
Is it better than requiring tls with valid cert for smtp? I can't see how.
Rather than all this mess, I think I'd prefer we start at tls/ssl required for smtp...
With SPF, DKIM, DMARC correctly set up, correct IPv4 and IPv6 reverse DNS, only A or AAAA or NS or GLUE records used in the entire resolution path, correct from and reply-to addresses, you should usually be good to go, though.
Though your right Google is having delusions of grandeur and the board should have stopped this for anti trust reasons and also I am not sure Googles developers have the required mind set to properly implement this
Why would they? Surely AMP for Gmail is a sweet revenue opportunity for Google, who are answerable to shareholders?
In case it's news to others, as it was to me, Fastmail routinely acquires SSL certificates for its customers' domains without their knowledge or consent.
We still need to find a way to provide automatic SSL for customer domains though - because we allow our customers to create arbitrary websites inside either their domains or their personal subdomain on our domains (username.fastmail.com).
The alternative of NOT doing something with SSL certificates is having insecure websites for customers by default, which will be more and more punished (and rightfully so) by browser interfaces. Setting up SSL for the domains which are hosted with us is the right thing to do.
The short-term nature of Let's Encrypt also works out well for this, because if you take your domain elsewhere, FastMail loses the certificate to claim to be that domain very quickly due to rapid expiration.
Having lived through the last DOJ/Google 10-month battle royale (the sale of ITA Software, now called Google Flights), I think this is an absolutely terrible idea for Google from an antitrust standpoint. The upside for them, while obvious, pales in comparison to the downside they face by leveraging their email and search dominance to create a new walled garden. I'm amazed this got past legal.