Email is the last big open protocol, and it's open in name only now
Email is what people point at when they argue the open web still works. Anyone can run a server, anyone can reach anyone, no company owns it. All technically true. Then you try to run one.
Stand up your own mail server and do everything right — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, reverse DNS, a clean IP — and your mail still lands in spam at Gmail and Outlook. Not because you misconfigured anything. Because you're new, and the reputation systems that keep spam survivable treat a brand-new sender as guilty until proven innocent — and you prove innocence by sending the kind of volume a personal server never produces. So eventually you give up and pay a big provider to be the "from" that actually arrives.
That's the quiet part. The protocol is open; delivery isn't. A few providers decide whether your mail reaches a human, and there's no appeal and no error — just a silent spam folder. We spent twenty years hardening email against spam, and the side effect was handing a small number of gatekeepers the power to decide who gets to send at all.
I don't think it's villainy. Spam genuinely was going to kill email, and reputation-scoring is most of why the inbox is usable. But "you can always self-host email" became a technically-true sentence that stopped describing reality. The exit is on paper.
Is there anything that actually reopens delivery for small senders — or is email now federated-in-theory like everything else?
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