[p2p-research] "Many of us will not send mail to gmail.com"

[M. Fioretti]

On Sun, May 10, 2009 13:28:20 PM +0700, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> I'll second wholeheartedly this explanation by Ryan,
>
> especially for non-tech oriented people like myself, we want to
> drive the car, but are not interested in knowledge about the motor.

There are technical reasons too, to not like centralized email
providers, and Marc explained those well, but the nature of the core
issue is different.  I don't think the car motor is an accurate
analogy in the context of the question I asked.

The nature of the question is not "why don't you look under the hood
and learn how to build or fix a car engine? It feels great!"

The question I'm asking is on the same type of

"why are you buying cars from a company that is known to adopt child
labor to keep prices low?"

The question above **is** a real exhageration, of course. I'm the
first to not take it seriously. It's just a quick way to stress the
point that the core issues is not technical, nor does it require
technical expertise or interest.

A much more accurate example of what category my question was meant to
fall in is:

"why, whenever you need a cab ride, you keep calling the cab company
which officially uses only one single gas station for all its taxis (=
if that one, centralized gas source breaks, none of those cabs will
work) and officially declares that they keep a voice recorder always
on in all their cars?"

Again, this doesn't mean necessarily that Gmail is bad period, is just
an example that a big part of the question isn't technical at all.

> Gmail has by far the most interesting ecology of services, it is
> what made the crucial difference that losing my laptop without
> backup wasn't actually a catastrophe, because my material is
> available through the gmail archive.

What saved your day is using web-based email and online backups. I
don't question such services, both of which are available in many
other ways. It is just curious to realize that this is the place where
the percentage of people who don't use other solutions (even if the
decision isn't technical) is quite higher than elsewhere.

> Centralization is not inherently worse in terms of robustness. Full
> p2p architectures would have their own problems.

I absolutely agree on that, as I wrote in the "thoughts on physical
production..." piece already linked.

Marco
-- 
Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84