So naturally everyone should just leave e-mail to be run by all the corporations.

You shouldn't own your car or your house, give them to all the corporations as well.

Nothing is stopping you and your three friends from running your own SMTP servers and emailing each other.

As soon as you want to do business with Outlook's customers, you play by their rules.

	▲	sirtaj 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This is one thing I find more on Hacker News than most other discussion sites. Any topic about annoying or bad behaviour by corporations eventually devolves to "they're allowed to do it". "They're allowed to do it" is one of those things that doesn't really bear saying so much because that's already been implicitly established. Nobody is claiming what they're doing is illegal, so how does this add anything of value? Who is still unaware that corporations will use their size and market control to their benefit?