No. Terms and conditions do not apply. Anyone can, at any time, for any reason. Email domains are a historic accident; let's semantically decouple them from the domain system. The tech companies can figure out how to implement that.
The nice thing about a law is we can figure out how to do it after, not before. :)
It wouldn't be difficult! There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, an average email address is probably 25 characters. If every email address is forwarded, that's ~380GB of forwarding data (from address + to address) - and keep in mind that's the stupidest implementation and the worst case possible. I'd like to think that someone who offers a public email service can reserve 380GB of SSD for a forwarding table without going out of business.
Practically, I'd expect vendors to quickly agree on a "301 permanently moved" scheme. So if a Yahoo user is sending an email to a GMail user who moved to a private mail server, Yahoo wouldn't even bother pinging GMail (after the first time) because they'd know that address was moved.
Which literally puts you on all autoreject spam lists because SPF and DNSSEC. Unless you pay for GSuite and/or your mail provider allows this custom domain functionality.
The point is, when you switch your phone operator, you don't have to pay the previous operator, in perpetuity, for the privilege of using your number without your calls being blocked.
Yeah but most people aren't paying for g-mail. It's like if you were using T-mobile "free" plan where you don't have to pay anything but you get a number that starts with "TMO", and then getting mad when you can't transfer your free number to Verizon because T-mobile refuses to transfer it.
...Or are they, except not in cash? :) Jokes aside, that's a fair observation, but then one should be able to "transfer" their address by paying a one-time fee, rather than getting a GSuite subscription.
True, email addresses ideally should be more like phone numbers where they are not tied to a specific corporate-owned domain (i.e. "gmail.com"). We would need some sort of standardized lookup though to support such a system.
SPF is trivial to set up for people who already have their own domain; it's literally 1 DNS TXT record.
I'm not aware of any mail providers that require DNSSEC. Were you thinking of DKIM? That's just 1 more TXT record (to publish the public key used to verify the signature), and some mail signing software if your mail server doesn't have that feature built-in (which is freely available).
It works for you (as in, single person). Not for your friends and family who will ask you one day what to do about the account they lost.
We (technical people) know this happens and have seen it happen - it is on us to push for better solution than convincing one person at a time. Unless one prefers nihilism and watching the world burn of course.
This is not about accounts on media consumption services - those can be easily replaced. From the tweets, this is the problem:
> My phone has lost access to thousands of dollars of apps on @GooglePlay. [...] My @googledrive data is completely gone. I can't access my @YouTube channel. The worst of all is losing access to my @gmail address of over 15 years.
This can be literally the end for a small company which started relying too much on that environment.
> The world is not burning. Do you know what was before play store, YouTube, twitch, whatever... nothing.
You know what was before electricity? Nothing. But switch that off today, and the whole world will burn.
Between Google Drive, Photos, GMail, and Google account being used as authentication, losing a Google account is a life-crippling situation for many people.
> It's not like they came and stomped over your beautiful garden.
That's the thing, though. They did. They put a highway next to it, and now nobody is gardening, the garden shop closed down, everyone's commuting to the city, and no one wants to buy my produce because my garden is too close to the road...
...or, to unpack it: the big platforms, by their very existence, killed off people's "beautiful gardens". Facebook and Reddit are why discussion boards are mostly dead. Google is why it's infeasible for most to host their own e-mail server these days (the heuristic of distrusting senders other than the big e-mail providers only works because there are big e-mail providers).
Sorry I couldn't disagree more, mobile devices were little more than mono function curiosities, app stores, love them or hate them, opened that too a whole new market where many software providers have made money. You can cry all you want about the Google and Apple profiting on it but there really wasn't any alternative before.
And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
The email spam issue is a problem. I'm not sure the solution for that because people are going to expose their email address and the spam torrent is real.
> And who hosted the discussion boards, companies? You can host one now if you want but if too many people actually used it the group think thought police would be all over you. That's why companies stopped hosting forums or comment sections, rarely worth the hassle.
About 20 years ago, one of my A-level friends set up his own site and discussion forum with phpBB. I still have friends from non-corporate IRC servers, and can even recognise a few Hacker News usernames from some of the channels I was on, though the relationship there is more of “in the same place at the same time quite often” (/me waves to @duskwuff ;)). It wasn’t all Livejournal and AOL chat.
lol, wow. On one occasion I actually did need to know, but only remembered which playlist it would have been in. I ended up having to search for websites that linked to a few dozen dead youtube urls. I never thought I'd be happy to land on a poorly executed Chinese content farm full of scraped html and incomprehensible markov chains. After that I started treating Youtube like the ephemeral thing it is.
Popularity cannot be dictated, unless you're suggesting something like a regulation that would limit the total number of users a website is allowed to register.
