There’s been a lot of recent discussion about PGP and email encryption. Quite a few people expressed confusion at the notion that “email encryption” isn’t a thing they should be doing. This post aims to elucidate folks about why this is the case.
Could someone add a bit more context about why the political climate would matter for email encryption?
TL;DR I think if the major players in email were hypothetically Google, Apple and Proton in the early 2010s, consumer email might’ve been potentially end-to-end encrypted by now. Is it OK to assume “political will” just means convincing for example Microsoft to turn on end-to-end encryption for individual/personal emails between their users, and inspiring others to follow?
In my mind, Skype debuted with end-to-end encrypted voice calls in 2003. iMessage debuted with end-to-end encryption in 2011. WhatsApp’s founders convinced Facebook (an obvious lover of data) to switch on Moxie-powered end-to-end encryption by default for their several hundred thousand strong userbase in the mid-2010s. In a lot of these cases this is previously enjoyable communication traffic going dark on a significant scale (or once these platforms grew in popularity). Nowadays most instant messaging services have added end-to-end encryption (even non Anglo-American services like Threema, Viber & ?Line? seem to have followed suit).
(more speculation) I am not convinced that the same couldn’t have happened for email. Google didn’t seem against the idea historically as written about in Google Online Security Blog: Making end-to-end encryption easier to use and presented in attachment:key_transparency.pdf of OpenPGPEmailSummit201512 - GnuPG wiki. It seems that the world was just unfortunate that the other major players in the space were companies like Microsoft or AOL who did not care for user privacy at scale (or pushing Google on that front).
Probably a reference to how EU has been trying to fight encryption for the last 3-4 years in the name of CSAR.
Sad but I accepted it.
Using email as little as possible and with no assumption that is anyhow secure/private. 
The term “Politics” is a broader scope than you probably realize if you’re asking that question.