No I do not underestimate profit incentives. I just realize that these things are not always so nefarious and there’s plenty of money for people to make by bringing things to market.
Regardless - cost effective, portable desal devices will be dramatically more profitable than sitting on a patent for 20 years (if even enforced!). Most people buying imported bottled water due so because they are lazy not because they are without access to potable water.
Jeeze you guys are so cynical 😂It’s true that many innovations from academic research fail to be commercialized or scaled. But it’s also true that many many successful technological innovations come out of academic research and impact the lives of millions.
The biggest barrier here will most likely be whether it can scale, not patent litigation.
Email is a collection of different protocols: SMTP, IMAP, POP are all different protocols that serve different purposes. Oversimplifying a bit, but - SMTP is used to exchange messages between mail servers. IMAP and POP are used to synchronize mail between a mail server and a mail client.
In other words, they absolutely can shut down IMAP and POP but still send/receive for gmail.com addresses. The main reason reason they wouldn’t do this is that their larger clients on Google Workspace need that functionality, but it’s the type of thing you might imagine them taking away from the unpaid version of Gmail to nudge companies over to Workspace.
The point I got from it was that Germans can go basically anywhere with low effort. The similar shades reinforce that, as concepts like “Visa not required” and “Visa on arrival” are pretty closely equal in burden.