During a phone conversation the other night I commented to Perry on the pointlessness of Apple’s decision to charge for formerly free email accounts. We’d both read an item sent us by a friend, and Perry was wondering if perhaps this is a sign of a shift to fees in many areas of the internet. Today he pointed me to this Dodgeblog item and gave my arm a severe virtual twisting in hopes I’d pass my comments on to the world.
It’s quite simple actually. Apple and others are battling for a market in email hosting just as it is about to go the way of horseshoes and buggy whips. This is perhaps more apparent to me than it would be to most since I do consultancy to data centres. My question to Perry, and to anyone else is “In a world where broadband into the home is common, why on earth would anyone leave their email hosting in the hands of a distant large corporation?” Or even a nearby small one for that matter!
It really hasn’t sunk in to the heads of most people yet that broadband to the home means much more than the opening of a huge market of passive consumers. It’s many to many communication, not one to many like television, radio and the movies. The internet is not just a new mass media. It is a total bypass of central control.
For a few hundred quid today and probably less tomorrow, I can put in a Linux firewall; I can run my own email and web hosting for my family photos from home; I can connect with my laptop from anywhere in the world through a
So I ask again. Why exactly should anyone care if companies start charging for email hosting? It will just drive the market towards home internet appliances. In a very few years the rest of you will be recieveing your PGP encrypted email over SSL connections into your own secure server where it is stored on an encrypted disk.
It’s not science fiction. A lot of us are already there.
