[anigbrowl]

Hotmail is a service offered to the public by a private entity, subject to certain terms and conditions - one of which is that the private entity (Microsoft) is allowed to put its own interests ahead of those of the user when those interests are threatened.

Should webmail and similar services be regulated so as to put the interests of consumers ahead of service providers? Perhaps, and in many ways this is the approach taken by European regulators in many industries. On the other hand, it has been argued that the rather onerous data protection regulations in the EU are partly to blame for the lesser competitiveness of European firms in that marketplace, by imposing overly burdensome regulatory regimes on entrepreneurs and thus making the barriers to marketplace entry far higher than in the US.