All this presents an odd paradox. In Internetty circles, especially among people who’ve been on the web for a long time, a common mentality is that open is good. And though email may be despised, it is still a cornerstone of the open web. “Email is the last great unowned technology,” said the Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain in an episode of the podcast Codebreaker in November, “and by unowned, I mean there is no CEO of email… it’s just a shared hallucination that works.”

Source: What Will Replace Email? – The Atlantic