Comment by elAhmo

> Email is an open, federated protocol. Anyone can run a mail server. In practice, running your own mail server is painful and everyone just uses Gmail. The protocol being "open" didn't prevent centralization.

This is an odd take and hard to agree with. I have never seen anyone complaining that email is a centralised service. GMail might be among the most popular solution, but there is a number of other solutions for "regular consumers", and many institutions, governments, etc. all run their email servers.