To me, switching away from Blitzmail means giving up on the beautiful dream of a decentralized, community-maintained cyberspace. For those of you who don’t know, Dartmouth’s Taskforce on E-mail and Collaboration Tools (TEC-T) is reviewing two possibilities for the future of Dartmouth email: Google Apps and Microsoft Online Services, both services offered free of charge. The taskforce plans to make a recommendation by May 25th, and the transition could begin as early as June. Switching to one of these services will mean that our email will no longer be hosted on Dartmouth-owned servers. It also means the software powering our email system—including the clients we run on our own computers—will no longer be built and maintained by Dartmouth staff and other community members.

The switch makes a lot of sense in light of budget cuts; running our own mail servers and maintaining our own custom email software is expensive. By switching to Google or Microsoft, the school will save some money and we students will likely enjoy more storage space and an email client that feels more modern.

Nonetheless, there’s something sad about the switch away from Blitzmail, and not just because it represents the death of a part of our beloved “Dartmouth experience.” To me, the Internet represents a place where there is room for everyone—a place where Walmart will never be the only store in town. Only on the Internet is the cost of entry so low, and the accessibility of niche communities so high that every single mom and pop can set up shop and find success, whether that success is measured in dollars or Twitter followers. The Internet is a place where we can escape the cold, impersonal behemoth of American capitalist monopolies.

And yet Google and Microsoft, the Walmarts of the Internet, are replacing a home-grown email system that we just don’t have the money to maintain any longer. It’s time to move on to the shiny new corporate-controlled email 2.0. It’s probably for the best. I’m ready to accept the future, but I still think we should take a minute to realize that we have given up on claiming a distinct space on the Internet. We’ve given the world just a bit more reason to stop chasing the dream of a decentralized, community-maintained cyberspace.