If you really want to break up Google, people are going to have to get used to paying for a ton of other services.

I’m not saying this is wrong, but it will come as a shock to many people when they have to start paying for email again (or start seeing ads in gmail again).

However, it shouldn't be a corporate product. It should be a public service, paid for by the taxes everyone already pays and regulated to ensure privacy abuse and productizing of the user base doesn't happen.

This is how things used to be done - when a new technology became important enough to society, it became part of the national infrastructure, everyone was guaranteed access and no one was allowed to profit off of it. That's how the original telephone network came to be in the US.

Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.

Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city? That's not punishment, that's behavior control. Maybe the parking ticket wasn't fair, or maybe it was someone else with the same name as you, or maybe you had a legal, legitimate reason for parking there.

The US government is required by law to treat people fairly and protect them (to some extent). More importantly, public services are (in theory) controlled by the people they benefit.

Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.

The US government is far, far behind where it should be as regards updating laws and services for the computer age. It's time to clean out the dusty, old computer illiterate career politicians and replace them with technically adept younger people.

No, that would lead to even worse abuses.

Cf the present day Hong Kong protests, and Yellow Vests protests - in both cases, the government would use snooping power to spy on the communications, dragnet style. Anybody seriously suspected of partaking would have the account shut down. Since the account would be "the official one", that would most probably render them unable to access other major services, like banking, judiciary, or healthcare records.

Having a corporate steward of email is one more level of indirection. While imperfect, the corporations do put up at least a bit of resistance against governmental over-reach. Even just the fact of having to create, send & monitor official correspondence to demand snooping & take-downs is slowing down the snooping a bit.

Moreover, it would be highly probable the government would mandate a "real name" policy, or otherwise tie the email service to your offline identity. Cue the abusers by online platforms like Facebook & other advertisers.

Lastly, it's more feasible to compete with corporate services than with tax-paid services. And it's competition that drives innovation, quality increase, and cost reduction.

Secrecy of correspondence is one of the basic constitutional rights in many countries. And also there is a public postal service almost everywhere.

Any example you could name would be highly contested as to validity of the claim.

Specifically, "elected by the people" doesn't grant any immunity by and of itself; you would need a huge public protest or other such expression of public will. You may still be ignored by the media, which prevents you from getting anything done[0]. On the other hand, "strong legal immunity from demands of the executive branch" would take a constitutional amendment; anything less can be rescinded with a simple majority vote or a judicial decision.

>But this doesn't mean that private, feudal and corporate power is the only other option.

You would need to create a very strong legal shield around such institution. Right now the government (particularly the judiciary branch) considers every private contract to be in its purview, with ability & willingness to void, add, or rewrite any and all clauses it considers wrong. Even institutions like marriage are subject to retroactive change of the original terms&conditions. Even the media, with its oversized influence through gatekeeping the political parties & candidates, is still bound by various regulations regarding falsehoods, besmirchment, etc., while at the same time tied intimately to their insider sources. About the only exceptions I can think of is the internal dealings of the churches, and the diplomatic matters [1].

On the other hand, any NGO is subject to the wishes of whoever finances it. Whether it is public donations or corporate sponsorship (or outright corporate structure); whoever holds the spigot of the money gets a say. Another important say is held by the media; with ability to either prop up or sink any NGO or public figure.

As of recent, the social media mobs seem to be gaining the gatekeeping ability just as well.

--

[0] quick examples of media keeping mostly quiet: weekly Yellow Vests protests, Paris, France, 45+ weeks; annual March for Life, Washington DC, US, 45 years.

[1] bit of a stretch, but also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...

I'd say if you are an institution established by public law, you don't need expression of public will for your normal operation. Or you need it to control you, not to affirm you. You just exercise your legal powers.

But I agree that my comment was abstract, and by the pervasive conflation I mean not only in common perception, but also in practice. What I have in mind as positive example is Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", or perhaps Switzerland as states deeply amalgamated with their populations. Anyway, if someone is strongly pro-government or pro-corporate, it's in their interest to present those as binary options. I think this should be opposed in principle, whenever possible, even if the present state of Western democracies is not that great.

The USG has been working quite diligently on that already. I don't think there's any particular reason to believe it can't read (almost?) any email it wants to. Very few emails are encrypted and host-to-host encryption is optional anyway. Various providers that have tried to resist USG secret warrants have just given up because it's not really possible.

Big email providers already do that.

It's exception, not rule. Even if they want you to give name, it's not something available for others if they only have e-mail address (unless address contains name).

In the UK I don't think it's possible to get a credit/debit card without giving up name & address that are backed by ID.

Gmail, IIRC, requires a phone number, which again is tied to your payment account (if you buy it in the UK). Though you could buy a stolen pre-paid SIM, so it's possible if you're not bothered about being legal.

In USA I understand you have pre-pay credit cards you can buy in a shop, in the UK you have to register those (using a phone number IIRC, thus tying it to a supposed real identity) and they're really expensive.

Even with custom domain, there are some mail providers that accept Bitcoin. See here: https://www.privacytools.io/providers/email/

And, once more: my previous point was that even if providers know your id, it is not public. There is no service you can use to ask what is name of e-mail address owner (I'm ignoring "whois", which is domain-specific, not mail).

I just would not use it for everything (not for criticizing the West; for that you could use a Chinese or Russian e-mail service). They can already snoop all the metadata anyway.

This is flat out wrong. AT&T made A LOT of money off this.

And to add to that public telephone service couldn't exist without a heavy public infrastructure investment in telephone lines, and continued support of that infrastructure.

The costs of supporting an email service are probably not great enough that government intervention is necessary.

Everyone with internet access already has free access to email and to any of several basic web based email services [1], but, to get that free access the owner has to be willing to host their own email server on their own infrastructure.

Email (as in SMTP email) is one of the original free and open protocols of the internet. No one is required to have 'google' to have email, although a lot of people prefer to 'let someone else handle the plumbing', which is ok if they understand the ramifications of that choice.

Note -- I am deliberately ignoring the sad fact that SPAM has made 'running their own server' much more difficult than it used to be for many. But a lot of that difficulty stems directly from allowing a single giant corporation to hoover up too much of the service, such that the single giant corporation has gotten big enough to start dictating terms to everyone else who is not part of their system.

[1] some examples (note: just found these via a search, no suggestion of good/bad is being made, just the availability for free):

    http://squirrelmail.org/
    https://roundcube.net/
    https://www.zimbra.com/

This link: https://www.jotform.com/blog/10-ajax-webmail-clients/ lists ten (some overlap with items above).

IMO it's really not a workable option, the administration is time-costly too.

But what would this take? If there were municipality-owned servers that allowed for basic email how could abuse be prevented? Make it an open source project with public inspection allowed to prevent abusive manipulation of data? E2E throughout the system? What would this take? Someone has to have thought about it before.

Better would be a standardized, secure public service to store and retrieve data on top of which any protocol could be built.

Once people own and control their service data, lots of things will become decoupled.

Sounds like a good idea. Do you know if any public entity has made an attempt at this space? I don't even know how to begin a search for this kind of work let alone if it exists.

The USPS or some similar highly-regulated corporation could easily provide basic email, banking, etc.

That, or we should start regulating email providers since it's no longer rocket science.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget#/...

Don't forget to include veterans benefits

Don't forget to include veterans benefits

and run without a profit motive

What if you could get a free email account through your internet service provider... oh wait.

Instead, maybe an extension of existing mail protocols to allow for updating address information would be better - for instance, mailing a deactivated address would give a special response announcing the change in address, so that information stored about addresses can be updated without user intervention.

Any thoughts on this?

Something like Gmail... I'm not sure if you mean by this; a multi-billion dollar tech stack built by the leading internet company in the world, securing exabytes of data for its customers with redundant backup, provided in hundreds of countries (and languages?), hosted across dozens of data centers, offering easy access through native apps on every dominant platform, with 5-nine availability,...

> [E]veryone should have free access to a basic web based email service.

There are two issues here, first is internet access and second is services available via the internet.

I think it is a great ideal to state that everyone in the world should have the ability access to the Internet in some form, with the ability to benefit from the online learning and communications tools it provides. Governments should use tools like spectrum licensing, and eminent domain to promote fair and equitable infrastructure deployments which provide reliable high speed access at reasonable prices to their entire population.

I disagree that government should outright purchase internet access for its citizens. The market for internet access is fairly anti-competitive already, government subsidies for specific levels of access work out poorly in practice, and tend to provide substandard service at above-market prices. This means the taxpayer loses and the citizen getting subsidized access loses. It works out better in theory and in practice to ensure your population has good paying jobs and can decide how they want to spend that money, including, whether they spend it on phones or laptops with LTE or wired internet access, which service provider they use, etc.

As to "free access to a basic web based email service" -- and to be sure, there's nothing "basic" about Gmail at all -- the amazing thing is that there are already a plethora of choices that netizens can make when setting up an email account, and many good free choices. Each of these free choices are usually subsidized either by paying customers of a premium offering, advertisements services with the email, or other services that the company offers.

What's great about this model is that companies are competing to provide the best possible email interface, at the lowest possible infrastructure costs to them, and attempting to offer such a great experience that they can ultimately convert those users into more frequent [paying] customers.

Practically everything about this model breaks down when you try to have "the government" provide the service.

> Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.

Gmail and other private services paved the way by spending their hard-earned R&D dollars to innovate and invent new delivery models for these services. To be sure, this was a public/private partnership at the most foundational level (ARPANET) and it has grown to be perhaps the crowning example of what private industry properly supported by government research and hands-off regulatory approach can achieve.

> Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city?

That unpaid parking ticket will mean, in many jurisdictions, that you cannot renew your registration or your license, which means the day will come when you cannot legally drive. That's the thing with State control of critical services; the day always comes when they will use a big stick to make you comply with their demands, or they will take those services away.

Private communication infrastructure must never be directly provided by the government, most especially. I'm sure you've heard of PRISM, or how a secret court allowed the government to vacuum up call meta-data for basically everyone in the United States for a period of time. Maybe you've heard of "reverse warrants" where the government pulls geo-location data from phones of everyone in an area that a crime was committed to create a list of suspects. Just this week the Courts rules [again] that government has trampled on the Constitution in wide-spread data collection.

Do you suspect that government provided email services will be instituted with the best-in-class end-to-end encryption algorithms? Do you suspect those troves of emails in a government server will be protected by government employees from overly broad subpoenas? Do you suspect the government will hire the best & brightest engineers to constantly push the envelope of how those services are delivered and the features they provide? Do you suspect government servers will consistently run on reliable, cost efficient infrastructure?

> Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.

Who gets to define "critical services"? Email didn't even exist as such a widespread part of our lives until private enterprise invested the hundreds of billions of dollars getting us to this point. Now that the ecosystem is established, you think the government should step in and strictly regulate it because a private company offering a private service terminated the account of one of its billions of users.

What else do you suppose is a "critical service" beyond email? Should we include cell phones? What about the news? Email seems such an arbitrary choice, but it is a great example to illustrate the dangers of this approach.

To switch back to TFA - and Google canceling this pour soul's account... What we don't hear about are the millions of accounts which Google terminates due to actual "valid" ToS violations. What we have is anecdotes, but what don't know are the true and false positive rates, or even the true/false negative rates of their abuse detection systems.

I believe Google needs to do a lot better with dispute resolution when an account is flagged for termination. This is true across their properties -- Gmail, AdWords, Store, etc. But I don't have the context & data I would need to pass judgement on the anecdotal failures I hear about semi-regularly.

I'm glad for the services that Google has created, because they push the whole industry forward in many ways, and they also provide incredible value for both users and Google alike. The ecosystem Google has created is an extremely impressive technological achievement, and the scale that they operate on is boggling.

The past is littered with failed examples of governments taking over and then failing to innovate or maintain an industry, whereas the examples of when government works side-by-side with private enterprise to create opportunities where the incentives did not align to allow a fully private solution are equally numerous. Government works best when it builds the roads to allow private industry to innovate upon, but doesn't try to build the figurative cars and trucks too.

That wasn’t a non-profit, neither were the first telegraph companies. Monopolies are problematic, private companies are not.

As far as cleaning out “old” politicians — that’s ageism. One’s birthdate doesn’t determine technical literacy.

We acknowledge that infants do not have the capability to competently vote, yeah? We have a minimum voting age requirement, which shows that we don’t find all action based on correlation with age to be illegitimate.

I think I am probably forgetting the original context.

Suppose that you are running a class at a local library on how to use some software, and you intend for it to be accessible whether or not the people attending have some specific background knowledge, but it is easier and faster if they do, because you don’t have to explain the background first. Suppose you also have a note sheet that you give out for them to take home in case they forgot any details. You actually have 2 versions of the note sheet, because one version also includes an explanation of the background information, and therefore takes more pages of paper.

Every time you run this class, you find that some of the people attending need the version including the background information, even if all of them are young, but you also notice that people over a certain age are statistically more likely need the longer sheet.

Therefore, when you know that a particular session you are running has a greater than average number of people over that age, you print more of the longer version of the notes sheet. Have you acted wrongly in doing so?

Is doing so “ageist”?

I don’t think so.

I would imagine in such situations, that the people with the largest amount of background in the topic would likely also skew somewhat older, at least for some topics.

But, seeing as I forgot the context outside of your comment itself, probably this hypothetical is quite unlike the situation in the context.

Edit: Ah, the context was politicians. Ok. Idk how to apply this to politicians.

I suppose I am not especially concerned for the individual politicians’ interests, as, aiui, politicians in the US tend to be fairly well off, have enough savings to retire, etc.

Therefore, the goal should be primarily based on how the choice of politicians impacts the rest of the populace.

There may be issues where a way of choosing politicians could cause or reenforce harmful stereotypes that harm other non-politicians?

I agree that it's draconian and goes too far but government very commonly screws people over over minor things by using monopolistic behavior like this and there are many people (including many people here) that endorse it when it (dis)incentivizes something they want (dis)incentivized. Point is this behavior will not go away if you have a public email provider. The list of triggers just becomes different. What Google doesn't like is different than the US government doesn't like is different than... you get the point. You may at least get due process though which would be good but the fundamental "this person has offended our organization so we're gonna screw them every way we can" behavior won't change unless society demands it.

edit: I'd be interested to hear why everyone finds my opinion so disagreeable.

I and a lot of other people are fine with that. Patron et al. showed that people are willing to support things they like. From podcasts to open source projects.

The narrative that the only way to have nice things on the internet is via advertisers' money is pushed by the advertisers themselves.

Not everyone has to do it, but there is enough of people to keep creativity free from influance ad companies.

There's upside to this too: it provides business opportunities. I think it's necessary for a healthy well-functioning economy.

Email existed before Google. The email services didn't all used to be owned and controlled by giants. Remember Hotmail and Yahoo Mail?

Email doesn't have to be a Government-provided utility service as another poster claims. It doesn't have to be free or paid. The market will make it work.

Just don't let Google operate it.

It's a simple narrative.

Google doesn’t “operate” email. Gmail one email service among many, that people can choose to use or not. Yahoo Mail is still an option.

I bet people will prefer "need to pay" as a shock instead of "locked out" as a shock (with no option of getting your stuff back). I certainly would prefer the former.

Its not yet known whether its true or not. There are no proofs in the github thread. He could at least post his google email so some google employee could check since this thread got heavily upvoted