For $1000 and $30 a month, anybody in the world could hire someone to setup and maintain a personal email server.
Of course being user owned, by definition users should be allowed to outsource their email service to large companies, and they do, because it's a lot cheaper that way.
But an email server they own themselves, with their own rules, own display preferences, compatible with billions of other email accounts, is well within their reach. And millions of people do just that.
Nobody is arguing that you can't set up your own system. You can build your own version of fb/twt etc... if you wanted.
The distinction is that 99.9% of consumers and an increasing number of organizations don't want to do it in house and would rather let someone else do it.
Again, it's not about capability, it's about what people actually are doing.
However, with gmail filtering out email from untrusted domains, you could argue that you actually can't build an email host that can send emails to all of your friends.
A year ago I would have agreed with you, but it is getting to the point where it is very difficult to run your own mail server (I still do).
In the name of fighting spam, Google, Yahoo, AOL, etc. have made it a real chore to get messages delivered to their networks. I still haven't figured out how to get messages delivered to AOL.
