The other thing that bugs me about these articles is the brazen two-faced argument where email is at once an open, distributed protocol between independent peer operators, and also there's exactly one way to do it, the way German privacy zealots insists on doing everything, and there's not another way!

If Google wants to receive your traffic at a later date thats their business and not yours. It's an open system where sites set their own policies. Access to a site's eyeballs is not the right of an outside sender!