[jolmg]

But Google isn't the only provider of email addresses. In contrast, water utilities typically hold monopoly over their region.

EDIT: Many people are replying with some variant that the problem is that Google can block the email account that people have tied to their financial and government services.

But the same is true of any other email provider. If Google is somehow turned into a public utility, how does that solve the problem for those that are locked out of their email accounts by Fastmail, for instance? Make Fastmail a public utility too, or somehow regulate it? But it's an Australian company, so kind of outside of American jurisdiction. Or regulate the addresses themselves? Put up a law that says that only US public utilities can administer emails on the .com domain? I don't really understand what people are proposing.

Or is the proposal just to regulate gmail.com addresses in particular? Treat them as the exception and incentivize more people to use that one provider so they get the protections offered by the proposed regulation.

[woodruffw]

I don't know where I stand on the public utility argument, but to make the strongest possible case for this analogy: most peoples' online lives (including their financials) are tied to a singular email address. That email address forms the ground truth for their identity, including being able to access services that they've lost their credentials for.

Google's ability to unilaterally revoke access to the account that ties you to your banking accounts, your state's online service portals, &c. gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

You can get the email address attached to any irl accounts reassigned by presenting yourself to the bank branch in person with ID. Probably there are mechanisms using certified mail as well for places that don't have nearby branch offices. It would be inconvenient but Google does not have the ability to unilaterally separate you from your financial accounts on any kind of permanent basis.

[woodruffw]

It occurs to me that I don't have an exhaustive list of all of the accounts that I've signed up to over the years with my email address.

If I'm banned by my provider, I won't have any recourse for many of them except to discover at some point in the future that I've missed an important alert, billing statement, or notice of action. And that's even before I know that I need to go to a physical location or mail in some kind of identification!

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address. I do encourage keeping backups of your email to reduce this risk -- at least you can search your records that way.

[woodruffw]

> You can as easily have the same problem with physical mail, but that doesn't confer an indefinite right to a particular physical address.

Of course not! But the USPS has (virtually) free change-of-address forwarding[1], and we have an entire set of social and governmental institutions pre-built around the impermanency of physical addresses. No such institutions exist for digital addressing.

I agree, re: backups, and I keep them for myself. But it occurs to me that the average non-technical individual probably doesn't know how to make a backup of their GMail account. I use GSuite, and the last time I checked I had to explicitly enable IMAP and then set a custom "app password" in order to set up IMAP access for my backup client. Oh, and there was some Google-specific TLS weirdness; boundaries abound.

[1]: https://www.usa.gov/post-office#item-37197

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

> No such institutions exist for digital addressing.

I do think it would be optimal if there were a fallback option for all types of digital accounts. It is not Google's fault, though, that there isn't, as they are not the cause of the assumption of email address permanence. You need to lay your blame at the feet of the service providers.

I do also think it might be ideal if Google would forward emails to an address of your choosing in the event they closed your account.

[jsnell]

Let's follow that argument to its logical conclusion. There is nothing special about the property you've described here. My high school, university, half a dozen previous employers, and several ISPs also gave me email addresses. I did not get to keep any of them when leaving those institutions.

What about smaller webmail providers? Yahoo and Hotmail gave me email addresses back in the day, and then deleted them for inactivity. Your argument applies equally well there. How about those Fastmail accounts that people are paying for? Should they get to keep them even after terminating service?

Clearly all of this is completely absurd. The "important stuff is tied to a single email address" case is extremely weak.

[woodruffw]

My university sheltered me and gave me a physical address, during which time that address formed an essential part of identifying myself to my bank(s) and the US Government.

You'll note that I haven't said anywhere that Google (or anyone else!) is obligated to provide indefinite email service to anybody who happens to sign up. What I've observed is that, unlike my physical address, there are virtually no formal recourses proportional to the role that my email has in my official identity. I can request an address change with USPS, I am guaranteed delivery service, and federal law protects my mailbox from tampering and snooping; nothing requires Google to provide anything resembling these safeguards.

[jsnell]

What do physical addresses have to do with this? The discussion was about email.

I understood your argument to be "email addresses are important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google should be regulated as a public utility". But like I showed, the same applies to basically every kind of organization providing email addresses.

So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.

[woodruffw]

> I understood your argument to be "email addresses are important" + "Google provides email addreses" -> "Google should be regulated as a public utility". But like I showed, the same applies to basically every kind of organization providing email addresses.

It's getting a little muddled, but the observation was this: email addresses increasingly serve the same role as physical addresses. We have an entire social and legal framework around the guarantees of physical mail because of how important it is to our ability to transact our daily lives; no corresponding framework exists for email.

> So either you are asking for basically every single organization to be a public utility, or there is some discriminating function you're not stating.

The discriminating function, as I said in the very first response, is the necessary role of a service in identifying ourselves to essential services (read: utilities, financials, government). My belief is that email satisfies this condition. But also, as I said in the first: I don't really know if I commit to the public utility argument; I merely wanted to point out that email serves a role tantamount to the canonical public service (public mail). If that's the case, we ought at the very least to have similar entitlements with our email providers.

[jolmg]

> gives them the kind of power that we'd normally only see in regional monopolies like water utilities.

No access to water from the only provider in your reach, especially if you're kind of broke, really doesn't seem equal to having your email account blocked, when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.

The situation sucks, but looking at this from a public utility perspective seems like an XY problem.

[woodruffw]

> when people have very accessible choices of email providers and what they tie to it.

I think this point might have been true 15 or 20 years ago, but I suspect that it no longer is on either front:

* E-mail is increasingly non-federated and subject to Google's dictates w/r/t delivery guarantees, origin identification, &c. These aren't bad things; e-mail was a mess before Google started taking it seriously! But it does result in a sort of natural dominance: smaller providers have to play by Google's rules to ensure delivery; large institutions are less likely to debug delivery issues to smaller providers. In other words, I have to be willing to accept a certain amount of second-class treatment.

* It's been my experience that my ability to not tie things to my e-mail has diminished over the years. More recent government systems and financial accounts require a valid e-mail; e-mail + password is now the default setting for creating an account on most services. Even when my e-mail is strictly optional for a service, it frequently operates as a safety net (recovery codes, poor man's 2FA, &c). Put another way: my inbox is treated as the high-availability, high-reliability delivery mechanism.

[jolmg]

Regarding your first point, is that from experience? Have you known of a case where a large institution sends a legitimate email to a small provider, the small provider rejects it, and the large institution does nothing about it?

If you're paying for your email provider, I would think opening up a ticket and asking to let their email through would not be much of an issue, if this ever happens.

[woodruffw]

> Have you known of a case where a large institution sends a legitimate email to a small provider, the small provider rejects it, and the large institution does nothing about it?

It's usually the other way around, in my experience: I'm sending something from a relatively small provider (or a institutional mailserver), and it's rejected (sometimes silently) by a larger receiver. The reasons tend to be opaque, and support is nonexistent (presumably because the overwhelmingly amount incoming mail is illegitimate).

It's a hard problem, and the reality is that Google has made the average user's email experience radically better. But the drawback of that is that they rule the ecosystem by fiat, and that there are relatively few entities that can play keep-up with Google's (unpublished?) standards for reliable delivery. Getting booted out of Gmail increasingly means being left out in the cold, especially as institutions (like the company I work for!) use GSuite for mail.

[sneak]

People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water pipe monopoly.

[woodruffw]

> People opted in to that. You don't opt in to the water pipe monopoly.

I accept this argument for social media, but I don't think I do for online identities that are tightly integrated into financial and government services.

I happen to be sufficiently positioned to cause a big stink if Google arbitrarily bans my GSuite account; the average person probably isn't, and would have to spend weeks reidentifying themselves to essential services (my power bill goes through my email!) to ensure that their material welfare isn't disrupted. Is that acceptable?

[sneak]

You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as well. You can opt out just as quickly.

Every time you smash that "log in with google" button, you're opting in to letting Google serve as intermediary for access to your account at a third party.

People are fools for doing this, but it's not Google's fault.

[woodruffw]

> You opted in to G Suite by pointing your domain there, as well. You can opt out just as quickly.

I won't deny that I opted in to a particular service, or that I can opt out just as quickly. But cf. the other threads about my formal recourses, quality of service, and others' expectations around reliability of delivery should I choose to leave the Google bubble.

Google's fault or not, I don't think this is an acceptable situation.

[buran77]

No, but Google holds monopoly over that email address that you've been using and passing around for years, and all the data associated to it. Losing access to it can prove to be a major issue.

Of course this is nowhere near as critical as water, food, or shelter. But in the modern world losing access to your long time email address, like a phone number, will cause some pain. I see no reason not to put such a responsibility on Google or companies of similar size which are so tightly integrated with the critical modern infrastructure.

I think we need to look at the utility of the service in the world and society we live in. Things change, 400 years ago a mill was the first utility in the US. That doesn't quite fit the definition anymore these days.

[themacguffinman]

If a monopoly over your essential email address is the motivation, then every single provider no matter the size has a monopoly over your email address. There's no reason to limit your judgement to "companies of similar size". Would you argue that ProtonMail and Fastmail and so forth are equally responsible for your email address?

Let's go further. Is Apple a public utility? If I buy an iPhone and it's painful to lose it, doesn't Apple have a monopoly over my iPhone given that they have kill switches and update privileges?

Is Hertz a public utility? If I rent a car and it becomes very painful to lose it, doesn't Hertz have a monopoly over my essential car?

[buran77]

I appreciate the time you took to come up with the examples but I hope you can see they're not quite comparable. An email address, like a phone number, identifies you uniquely. But unlike phone numbers there's no "portability", you can't take your gmail address with you to yahoo. Losing access to your email is more akin to losing access to your name than to an appliance of sorts.

A phone or a car are nowhere near that level of uniqueness. People don't need your IMEI or VIN number to identify you. You can still have a backup of your data which for all intents and purposes will turn any other phone into the one that was taken from you. And if Hertz somehow just takes back your car full of your personal stuff you have plenty of recourse. Most other critical industries were either regulated as utilities or self regulated.

The problem is that companies like Google give you the service ostensibly for free and use this to justify being able to completely cut access to your account with absolutely no recourse and no explanation. You didn't pay anything so you can't expect anything. On the other hand they do monetize your data which invalidates the "for free" premise. They also don't give you any possibility to transfer the ownership of those uniquely identifying elements.

Perhaps any mail provider like ProtonMail or Fastmail should also be regulated as utilities. When electricity was deemed a utility it was probably used by fewer people and it was less useful to them than mail is today. At the very least companies like Google, Apple, and the rest of the bunch should be very tightly regulated.

You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.

Let's put it another way: maybe an email provider should not be allowed to be used for critical services like banking, utilities, public services, etc. unless they themselves accept to be regulated as utilities. The point is to not have critical services relying on ones with a proven low quality of service track record.

[themacguffinman]

I wasn't talking about a phone number or IMEI or VIN, I was talking about an iPhone. An iPhone can identity me if I setup iMessage, which is based on a phone number but effectively takes it over so that Apple receives all texts sent by other iPhone users on my behalf until I unregister it in some way. It's a common complaint that just switching to an Android phone can result in lost messages and is a notable switching cost.

People use my address to identify me too. Does that make my rented home a public utility? I can't take my home address with me. I guess my landlord should be forced by law to renew my lease indefinitely otherwise I'll lose my geographical name.

> You can use maps or youtube without an account but you will never receive that job offer without your email. And you may not be able to access your other critical accounts since they rely on email.

Of course you can receive job offers without a specific email. You can update your job seeking profile and inform companies you've applied to of a new email. It's also entirely up to you to share additional forms of contact like a phone number when you apply.

Any account critical enough to be considered a public utility like banking, utilities, public services, etc won't be solely based on email and will have non-email recovery mechanisms, usually based on your actual identity.

[ljm]

A phone number is less of a problem as you have portability. Or you can have it. In the UK for example, regulation means that you can automatically transfer your number between providers at no cost. It's a painless process.

That's going to be a lot more difficult when your email address is tied to a certain domain, like gmail. I think there has to be a different kind of solution there, that is more accessible to the layman than setting up your own domain and dealing with MX records and stuff.

[vvillena]

In some countries water distribution companies are not the same as the commercial suppliers, and you can freely contract your supply with any company you want.

The issue isn't that people are free to choose any email address. The problem is that Google effectively holds people hostage once they get involved with its ecosystem. And due to its sheer size and power, no one can afford to be banned by Google. And there's no real way to appeal. It's a rights regression of sorts.

[basch]

However, even with an email address, what are the chances you eventually try and email someone who has gmail. If you get put on the spam list, youre as good as not existing. In concept thats not that different than having an internal account shut down. You still dont exist to google, or any of their patrons.

[colordrops]

It could be very difficult or impossible to access some accounts that use the email address for two factor authentication. And these are typically the most critical accounts.

[entropicdrifter]

I mean, that's really on the user for not setting up more than one 2FA method for their highly critical accounts

[colordrops]

That's for properly engineered services. There are many services that won't grant access without your email after auth has expired.

[Dma54rhs]

Not if you're allowed to build a well, which is a lot of places. Install a pump. Same for electricity - solar and huge ass batteries for the night. Definetly not only providers despite being classified as utilities.