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Comment by fallingknife | Hacker News Reader

Utility services start off as luxuries, and are private and unregulated. This was true with telephone and electric companies. When these services get to a certain point where there are real consequences for not being able to access the system, they need to have public regulation to ensure access and customer service. ISP internet service has definitely reached this point, and I think that there's a strong argument that Google & FB accounts (particularly for businesses) have reached this point as well.

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I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.

I am sympathetic to the argument though. Getting locked out of your existing Gmail account could be really disastrous. Maybe there should be regulation for email extrication — if you’re going to ban me, you better allow me to update all of my accounts to not use your email service first.

You seriously dont think email, search, or direct-messaging services sound _anything_ like the telephone or the postal service or the radio?

The are critical pieces of the modern world yes. But not a utility. One cannot live without a utility and utilities generally have a monopoly in most places. If my power or water company bans me for some reason I am toast. I have to endure undue hardship to get something that provides may be 10% of the utility (own well, water pump, generator...). Internet itself (the pipes) on the other hand are probably a utility. I prefer the natural gas like solution though for internet. Someone owns the infrastructure and it is heavily regulated. Multiple other companies resell it, provide addon services etc. But search, email etc are like cars in the US. Essential, but also a business operating in a competitive space.

The problem with that logic is that just the plain internet access is becoming less and less useful everyday as the internet moves more towards walled gardens. It's like if the basic phone service only allowed you to communicate with other land lines, but you had to have an account with Google / Apple to make and receive calls with Iphones / Androids.

if someone has everything tied to their gmail account and google bans them, they're toast.

> But search, email etc are like cars in the US.

The big players in search, email, social have a larger market share than the big car producers. There's no 'Google' or 'Facebook' of cars.

Cars are fungible, email address not so much. If you get banned from owning or servicing your Honda, you can sell your Honda and get a Toyota.

If you get banned from using your Gmail, you can't just switch to Hotmail.

If you own your own domain and use that with Gmail, you absolutely can switch to another provider and keep your email address if Gmail bans you.

Using your car analogy: If Honda provides me a car for free, I don't expect them to allow me to do whatever I want with the car that I don't own.

So you think it would be ok for Honda to show up at your house and say "You can't have this anymore we're taking it" and then take all the stuff that happens to be in the car, even if you are using it for free?

I expect that Honda will set the terms under which I can use the car, and if I don't like them, I need to buy my own car.

As for the stuff in the car, it's a poor analogy. The stuff in your Gmail account is easy to duplicate, unlike physical stuff, and it's your responsibility to back it up.

As you can guess, I don't use free email services, and I don't rely on the mail always being in the hands of a provider - I always have my own copy via IMAP. This was the normal way to do email, and the barrier to entry is low - most people doing this in those days were not tech folks.

It's just silly to demand that a company spend money to provide something to you for free, and then demand they be treated as a utility. Especially where plenty of alternatives exist.

A service does not have to be a monopoly to be classified as a utility, nor does it have to be life-threatening if inaccessible. Mobile phone in my country is provided by 4 major independent companies (and this isn't the US but a country with only a few M people, so 4 big providers is a pretty good number) and they are still required to allow free transfers of numbers to other providers.

> One cannot live without a utility...

If my water got shut off, my life would go on pretty normally - drinking water is cheap in stores, bars are required to provide it free of charge and I can shower at a friend's place or something. If I lost my email account however, I'd have months of work ahead of me just to restore my digital life to its previous state and my livelihood would be at risk. All bills go to my email so I couldn't pay for the services I and my business need, business partners wouldn't be able to reach me, neither would my customers... In fact, I can't really think of any other single thing that would cause more problems if lost than my email account(s).

The type of regulation you are suggesting is consistent with what I am talking about. All utility services don't have to have the same exact rules. You can always be banned (even from driving on public roads), but just not without being given a stated reason and the chance to appeal it to an actual human who has to follow some set of consistent rules or due process.

> I hate FB and Google, but I don’t buy this argument. It doesn’t pass the duck test for me — doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view.

When Twitter was the only way to get updates on my passport application was when these platforms became utilities to me.

> doesn’t look or quack like a utility in my view

Imagine trying to run a small business without access to either Facebook, Google, or both. Business owners whose operations have been inadvertently banned have written about it at length; it appears to cause serious issues.

Email absolutely should be a utility and allow you to transfer your email address between providers just like you can your phone number. I understand the technical challenges associated with that due to how DNS and the email protocols work, but I don't particularly care. There should also be a legally required minimal level of customer support for email account issues - if I can't get access to my email for over a week because of an issue on their end or even on mine, there better be a support rep ready to talk to me over the phone and get it sorted.

For all of the things that could ruin me if lost/stolen (government ID, bank accounts, phone number...), I have an automatic last-resort strategy of getting in a car, driving to a place and annoying someone in-person enough to get my problem solved. But email is the only exception.

I've tried looking for providers in my country, but they all went out of business around the time gmail launched. So now my only options are international megacorps with no support for anyone without 100k twitter followers or small companies with offices on the other side of the continent.

DNS is used to figure out initial point of contact over SMTP, nothing stops said SMTP server to recognize recipient as transferred account and forward message to SMTP server account was transferred to.

That would only help if you transferred an entire domain, surely? The initial DNS lookup doesn't have the local part that you'd need to identify individual accounts, does it?

Of course, but that still relies on the SMTP server's support. If a provider goes out of business or simply refuses to forward messages, an email address is still dead. That's why we'd need laws to regulate both scenarios: require operators to forward old accounts regardless of anything (including things like government sanctions) and set up a central email forwarder organization to take on email domains of defunct providers (and the legal framework to transfer domains to it).

An ideal system would of course allow you to truly take your address with you to another provider and sever any link to your old one, just like you can with your phone number. The current semantics of email addresses don't allow that or require you to own your own domain name, which given the sad state of the business end of the DNS, isn't feasible on a large scale either.

I don't see a massive difference between a Gmail account and a phone number. One is typically provided by a company, in a competitive marketplace, with rivals available. That one is regulated and has to adhere to portability which lets you continue to make and receive calls using that number indefinitely, without any further payment.

The other is provided by a large company, again in a (semi) competitive marketplace, but is totally unregulated and can kick you out at any time. They don't let you migrate your email address, and you can't send or receive mail to/from it if the company throws you into a Kafka loop.

It strikes me the anomaly is that email service isn't forced to be portable and delivered as a baseline utility, with "send on behalf of" and "forward without looking at or storing" as non commercial, non charged functionality that must be offered indefinitely, so a user can port their mail if they move away from a provider.

When looked at this way, I don't see the difference between mobile service and email - mobile providers don't enjoy a monopoly, but are regulated and need to deliver portability free of charge.

You started with "Gmail" and then switched to "email".

Much of what you say is not true with email in general. I own my own domain and I absolutely can take my email address anywhere.

Also, keep in mind that people typically pay for phone service. I do not think you can demand portability if a company provides you a phone number for free (which some do).

If you want portability for email, buy your own domain.

Bread! We should definitely regulate bread that way.

It's way more important than Google and Facebook.

We kind of do, which is really the point. There are all sorts of regulations about making and selling bread to ensure safety and fitness for purpose as well as all sorts of programs such as SNAP, WIC, school lunches, many state programs, etc. all to ensure that everyone has access to bread.

Yet, bread ain't regulated like these other utilities.

Or to give another example that lighter in regulation than food: shoes.

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