Andy Yen has big dreams for ProtonMail, the secure email service he founded in 2014 that now has 50mn users worldwide. One day, he hopes, it could be a rival to Gmail, the communications behemoth owned by Google, which boasts over 1.5bn users.
But he says Proton can never be a true competitor to Google while the internet continues to be an unregulated wild west. “We grow based on the goodwill of tech giants,” Yen says from his head office in Geneva. In fact, he says, the same goes for his company’s very existence. “Tech giants could today remove us from the internet with zero legal or financial repercussions.”
