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.