Gmail: An Example of Control Addiction
May 1, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read “Is Gmail Killing Independent Email?” The main idea for the essay by an outfit called Tutanota is to answer the question with a reasonably well-reasoned, “Yes.” I am not going to work through the headaches caused by Google’s spam policies. Instead I want to present one statement from the write up and invite you to consider it in the content of “control addiction.”
I circled one statement which illustrates how Alphabet responds to what I call “control addiction.” My definition of the term is that a firm in a position of power wants more power because it validates the company plus it creates revenue opportunities via lock in. Addicts generally feel compelled to keep buying from their supplier I believe.
Is it okay that Gmail has the power to decide whether a business is sending spam or not? At the very least, Gmail support team should have listened to the company and looked into the issue to fix it. If Google is not willing to do this, it is just another sign of how Google can abuse their market power and hinder smaller services or – in this case – self-hosting emails, limiting the options people and businesses have when they want that their emails are reliably received by Gmail.
Several observations:
- Getting a human at Google is possible; however, some sort of positive relationship with a Googler of influence is necessary in my experience.
- That Googler may not know what to do about the problem. Command-and-control at the Alphabet, Google, YouTube construct is — how shall I phrase it? — quantumly supreme. The idea is that procedures and staff responsible for something wink in an out of existence without warning and change state following the perturbations of mysterious dynamical forces.
- Google is not into customer service, user service, or any other type of other directed service unless it benefits the Googler involved.
Net net: Decades of regulatory floundering have made life cushy for Googlers. Some others? Yeah, not so much.
Stephen E Arnold, May 1, 2023
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