[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.