Wait, Google does search these days?

To what? Google Search sucks thanks to the idiot who ran Yahoo into the ground, but everyone else sucks more. Every time I try to use non-google search the results are virtually useless.

Google has firmly been in the "we're so big we can suck at everything, but you'll still use our stuff because you have no other choice" phase that Microsoft was (is?) in.

They've dominated email so much that their spam filter makes it a very risky proposition to run your own domain; chances are very good it'll just start dropping your messages. Even if chances aren't great, can you take the risk of an important email getting zapped?

To this day I still routinely have to fish out my gmail spam folder dozens of emails from various open source mailing lists that have been around for a decade or two, some hosted on kernel.org, because the spam filter is convinced they're spam. Google is too fucking stupid or lazy to whitelist sites like kernel.org.

FFS even google groups I'm in that are technical get obviously-not-spam messages tagged as spam!

> No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one.

Based on some data I collected around five years ago, roughly 80% of US customers used GMail for personal email. It was overwhelmingly the most common choice. I suspect that number has only drifted upwards since.

(What about the rest? 15% were using Yahoo; the rest were spread thinly across AOL, Microsoft, ISPs, and colleges.)

Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails

In the days when AOL was the largest AOL, the only people on the internet were middle class and above and the uber-nerds. The landscape has changed.

When AOL was the largest email provider, there weren't as many people using email, at least not for important things

In a better time I would expect the government to step in a acquire this fundamental service and fund it with tax money. Right now? The only intervention I would expect is a massive subsidy to pay Google to keep providing it, while also letting them continue to spy on everyone's mail (which is a crime, but not if the mail is on a computer, I guess).