Who is "they"? Your city council? Your nation's legislature? The commie-nazi-jewish-muslim-reptilian cabal who puts radios in your teeth?

No major government will forbid effective encryption, because citizens are far more afraid of other citizens than they are of the government. That's why governments request backdoors, or pass legislation permitting warrantless searches.

Think of it this way: your city council will never be able to pass a law forbidding people from locking their car door, because everyone with a car would be screaming about theft. But they could easily pass a law requiring car manufacturers to provide a master key to law enforcement.

This makes sense. By 'they', I meant governments. I always wondered why no mail/im providers support pgp or similar encryption. This means there never will be such a service, since the only master key would be with the end user.

Webmail providers don't provide PGP support because it is not possible to securely implement PGP for webmail. All web-based interfaces are inherently a proxy through a third party, so if you want to read your encrypted mail on the web, you must give your webmail provider the decryption key.

Given this, it's better for webmail providers to not pretend to support secure mail.

DuckDuckGo has no legal presence in countries like that, or any desire to have one. They'll do what is legal in the US, and ignore the complaints of any other country.