Uh, no. SMTP, IMAP and POP3 only became popular as a sort of accident, in the midst of a bunch of warring protocols and standards, two of which were expected to be the leading messaging system, not the current ones. There was never some grand plan for internet hippies to all come together around "federated" services.
There is no such thing as the open and impartial internet. It's a melange of fiefdoms which only works through loose agreements between giant providers that tacitly allow all kinds of shit to happen in the hopes that they'll recoup the cost through their own business plans. The internet is quasi-open; open enough at the level that you interact with it that it "feels" open, sometimes. And it most certainly is not impartial. Competing interests have been warring over pieces of the pie for decades, and use whatever control they can grasp to make as much money as they can, while they can. Nerds running self-hosted servers and railing on about the inequities of corporate control on forums have absolutely no say.
> I get that spam is annoying (I hate it too) but letting giant American tech companies decide who is allowed to send email and who isn't is not the solution.
Again, they aren't. They have their own e-mail system, and you can use it or not. They aren't telling you you can't send your own e-mails or run your own systems. You are just upset that they have their own party and won't let you choose the music. You could throw your own party, but you don't want to do the work that entails, while you do want to force the people who are doing the work to do it your way, despite everyone else in the world not giving a shit and not wanting to deal with the problems anymore.
E-mail is not state sponsored racism. Again, you can choose what e-mail provider you use, and run your own mail system, and do whatever other asinine navel-gazing techno bullshit you want. Nobody is stopping you. They just aren't going to accept what you make. That's not oppression, that's called competition and free choice.
I'd be curious what you think of the telephone. Was that too intended to be some kumbaya international symbol of freedom that anyone could do anything they wanted with? Are you looking to run your own switchboard, and upset that AT&T won't carry your calls without forcing you to pay to hook up to their equipment? How dare they be able to reject your homemade lines to connect to their customers?
You want to know what actually not having a choice means? It means you can't even run your dinky mail server at home because the service is deemed illegal. That has not happened, and will not happen, because literally nobody cares about you and your e-mail service. You are the only person who cares about this. You are obsessed with a principle for the principle's sake, and the funny thing is, that principle isn't even being violated.
You want an end to the "tyrrany"? Use that engineering genius to come up with a solution to spam that doesn't revolve around IP reputation. Companies around the world will gladly take your mail if you can come up with a solution that doesn't require them to spend millions to mitigate spam.