For serious though, there's not really any lock-in here (yet). You could replace everything from the certificate through the public DNS with GoDaddy and things would work just fine. I don't really see Google moving to close the web parts of this.
We still need to make choices that guarantee it's the case in the future. We need to ensure we don't end up with environment as diverse as email where most people use Gmail, or Linux services which are all being rewritten under systemd, or many other cases where we voluntarily choose a monoculture that can force our choices in the future...
good luck? with that attitude you deserve shitty centralized systems that spy on you. decentralization and ease of use aren't contradictory anyway. remember bit torrent? used to be very popular, even among less technical users. great UX too. click a magnet link and you have your content in a flash.
the problem is that there isn't a multi-billion dollar business case for decentralized user systems. a lot of server/dc tech is both decentralized and distributed because it is a more robust architecture. again, the reason this doesn't extend to the consumer is because it give them too much control and clogs up the revenue stream.
this isn't a technical or usability problem, as you claim. this is 100% economic.
Spam blocking is a problem that's very difficult to solve without massive scale. Decentralized email used to suck for filtering spam because they simply didn't have the scale needed to recognize spam reliably.
WordPress solved the spam issue for decentralized blog comments by centralizing it, which gives them the scale to solve it well but also gives them the ability to read probably half the blog comments on the web in real time.
No, it really isn't. Download a copy of SpamAssassin, train it on 400 hand-picked spams from your own mailbox, train it on 400 arbitrary hams as well, and you will have very accurate spam filtering. I was shocked how well it worked; I run my own mail personally and use GMail at work, and the results are (subjectively) indistinguishable. A Dovecot plugin that keeps the Bayesian numbers up to date as I move messages in and out of the Spam and Archive (for ham) folder completes the picture.
To go deeper, it turns out that Bayesian filtering is remarkably resilient. Even attacks which try to poison your filters by including ham-like content in spams are ineffective, because spammers cannot very accurately predict what your own particular flavor of ham is like. (People don't often mail me passages from out-of-copyright Victorian romance novels.)
I find that a few botnet-reducing SMTP heuristics plus Bayesian is sufficient; I dallied with some of the fanciness that compares known-spam hashes with other people, but it turned out not to be necessary.
Maybe it has changed but I have vivid memories of training lots of spam a decade or so ago and still getting half-assed results. Google was the first email provider that really did a good job blocking spam.
There is one setting, underdocumented, which makes a big difference these days. spamc has a default ceiling of 10K, messages larger than which it passes unchecked. Spammers have started routinely including images just over that threshold to defeat default installs. Bump that up a bit, and your accuracy will go way up.
I find it disingenuous to compare Google vertically integrating the Internet with systemd, a FLOSS product that objectively solves many of problems init systems had.
> I don't really see Google moving to close the web parts of this.
Google actively restricts which programs and extensions you can install on a Chromebook and Android, Google restricts what you can publish on their infrastructure, and AMP is also becoming somewhat of a problem.
On Android, Google killed all other push notification services (and tries to prevent people from writing open source libraries for theirs), by only allowing notifications from Google Cloud Messaging to work when the device is saving battery (basically always on recent versions).
After trying to fight this for quite a while, I do really see Google moving to close this.
For serious though, there's not really any lock-in here (yet). You could replace everything from the certificate through the public DNS with GoDaddy and things would work just fine. I don't really see Google moving to close the web parts of this.