Does it even matter when in reality it's more likely that this is intentional anti-competitive behavior by Google?
They once made all emails from my very reputable small German email provider (a company that has existed and provided email services long before Google existed) go into a black whole - not bounce them back or anything like that, mind you, their servers accepted them and made them disappear forever. I was in contact with the technicians then to get the problem fixed and they told me it's very difficult for them to even reach anyone at Google. It took them several days to get the problem fixed.
Of course, no one will ever be able to prove an intention behind these kind of "technical glitches." Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it, so certainly nothing will happen when small issues with interoperability occur and drive more people to Gmail.
At scale, it's very hard to distinguish malicious intent from the simple consequence of being the largest operator in a space so any motion one makes makes waves.
For what it's worth: having seen some of how the sausage is made, Google isn't particularly interested in screwing over a small reputable German provider. But they also aren't particularly interested in supporting such a provider's desire to route messages to their users because the provider is small. At their scale, "I've forgotten how to count that low" is a real effect. And email, as a protocol, has been pretty busted for decades; it's not Google that made the protocol so open-ended and messy to implement in a way that providers will agree is correct.
> Nothing of significance ever happened when Google had large optics fiber connections with NSA installed illegally and claimed to have no knowledge of it
Nothing of significance outside Google. Inside, Google initiated a technical lift that turned their intranet into an untrusted-by-default ecosystem so that data was encrypted on the fiber (as well as between machines within a datacenter, to head off future compromised-employee attacks). That process took at least five years; I suppose there's a scenario where it was all smoke and mirrors, but being on the inside in the middle of the process, I watched several C-suite who are not particularly good actors be bloody pissed at the US government for putting itself into Google's "threat actor" box and making that much work for the system engineering teams.
Also, an engineer at Google then made an end-to-end email crypto plugin for Chrome, including a flag that was a nod-and-middle-finger to the information revealed in the Snowden documents. https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/04/nsa-mocking-easter-egg-fou...
What does “not particularly good actors” mean in this context? Actors as in theater? Or “Bad actors” plotting evil things?
Thanks for this reply full of interesting information! These kind of comments are what I like about HN.
Long time ago when I was managing ISP email relay and customers asked "Where is the message I've sent?" seeing in the logs message accepted by receiving SMTP server was the end of the debug for me: I just handed the customer the part of the log and suggested talking to the receiving side IT administrator.