If Alice and Bob agree to run their own SMTP daemons, closed to the public and not necessarily on port 25, and they each agree to put the other on their "whitelist", how is this functionally different from the current third party controlled system? Answer: 1. Immediate delivery, assuming Bob and Alice keep their machines online. 2. No spam. 3. No third parties exerting control over their mail. No idiosyncratic delivery policies.

I'm afraid there's no need to convince any provider of anything. At this point, Alice and Bob are sending and receiving email without the need for any third party "email provider".

Functionally blacklists and whitelists are the same. They both have the same goal. But they are not the same in their effect. Blacklisting an entire netblock to stop one bad IP address affects many IP addresses who do not need to be blocked. Whitelisting a single known IP address does not have that side effect. For Alice and Bob, handling their own messages may be a desired option. Of course, not everyone may follow Alice and Bob's example. But who cares? The population using email is enormous and diverse. The point is that if someone wants a better solution than what "email providers" offer, she can get it.