[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.