I want to take you through a little thought experiment.
Imagine you run a billion or trillion dollar company. Then you decide to sell your shares and retire.
What happens to your company? Does it matter to you? You and your family are set up just fine for the rest of your life.
But what about your company's customer base? What about the services that you provide? Someone will take over after you... and there are lots of pitfalls.
This site is about GMail. So let's talk Google.
Imagine Google goes bankrupt. "That can't happen!" Well technically, it can... and it isn't so far-fetched. But there are other failure modes.
What if Google gets hacked? Or some employee has an ethical compromise. Or they get a new CEO who goes wild and crazy. Or they build a robot that makes some questionable decisions on their internal network.
These ideas are at least plausible. Do you see how far-reaching the blast radius is?
SO much of the communication on the web flows through Google's servers. People literally cannot share an email with their parents without Google's help.
Don't get me wrong. They offer a great service. But do we really want one company controlling so much of society's communication because they provide quality, free email?
Do you know why they provide such a good service for so little cost?
Because you are the product being sold. That's right. You. Your emails. Your web traffic. It all comes through your email and they sell the information they take from it to advertisers.
So that's one of the reasons we advocate for canceling GMail.
Let's bring some decentralization to the web.