Some of us still leave our doors unlocked, too.

I've never even had the key to mine. I've lived here over a decade.

So naturally everyone should just leave e-mail to be run by all the corporations.

You shouldn't own your car or your house, give them to all the corporations as well.

Nothing is stopping you and your three friends from running your own SMTP servers and emailing each other.

As soon as you want to do business with Outlook's customers, you play by their rules.

This is one thing I find more on Hacker News than most other discussion sites. Any topic about annoying or bad behaviour by corporations eventually devolves to "they're allowed to do it".

"They're allowed to do it" is one of those things that doesn't really bear saying so much because that's already been implicitly established. Nobody is claiming what they're doing is illegal, so how does this add anything?

> As soon as you want to do business with Outlook's customers, you play by their rules.

That seems to be turning into "you spend money to another corporation that we trust".

You might be on to something with the car thing... Maybe most people should rely on public transit.

Do most people live in cities? Probably they do, but where I'm at, no, I shouldn't rely on public transit.

This is also true for like 99% of the landmass of America.

The problem isn't that a random person can't rent a Moldova VPS and run an email server, though. It's that most people are forced into gmail, apple and outlook accounts if they want to use phone/PC, and a respectful Moldova company now can't reach their respective Moldova clients without paying money towards USA.

Switch Moldova to almost any country (or even a state that isn't California or Washington), and it's the same story everywhere

The bad actors are actually using mostly gmail and outlook accounts so this is a weak justification.