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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

There are now phone plans that are paid for by selling your data and sending you spam SMS. There are e-mail providers that operate similarly, and most e-mail addresses are registered with one of them. Those things don't really work for snail mail, but few people use it anymore, because sending a letter costs more and they have come to expect communication not to cost money.

The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized since "free of charge, paid for by data and ads" has shown itself to be a viable business model that users love. (Until they understand what's happening, at least.)

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>The formerly decentralized services are no longer so decentralized

People keep saying this but to my knowledge email still isn't centralized. While there are a lot of gmail users in the US but that's not the case in many other countries, many people also have a .edu email and a few years ago I ran my email server myself (I even handled signing papers when I switched jobs over it.) Google even contributed to and pushed for dkim and spf which solved a huge spam problem that threatened their ability to forward mail from smaller outside domains to their users. A lot of people might use one of the big services but as long as you don't have to in order to interact with them it's not "centralized."

Your point is valid, but we still live in a world where we can call Verizon phones with AT&T phones; send e-mails to Gmail users with Yahoo; and send mail with UPS instead of USPS. With those means of communication, we still have control over our providers.

There is no control within Facebook's ecosystem. Similar with AOL, if you don't use Facebook, you're necessarily out of the loop, and I don't feel comfortable with that.

> and send mail with UPS instead of USPS

Not to detract from your point, just thought you might be interested to know that USPS actually has a legally-protected partial monopoly on the right to carry letters (18 U.S. Code § 1696).

An exemption was added in 1979 allowing private carriers to deliver "extremely urgent" mail. This is why UPS and FedEx express mail envelopes bear that text on their front.

Apart from this exemption, USPS, FedEx and the like are only allowed to deliver 'parcels', not 'letters', though I'm not sure where the distinction is legally defined.

More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Express_Statutes

Interesting, thanks.

I don't think decentralization just means > 1. That you can use 4 services is not very decentralized.

While true, I think it is important to emphasize the difference between 4 platforms and 4 carriers. With both postal mail and email, its not just that there are alternative systems, but rather that you as the sender can choose any of the offerings to reach anyone, even if they use a different carrier for their own needs, so there is a lot more competitive pressure on those 4 carriers than with 4 platforms where network effects keep people locked in.

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