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This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ... Somed

This is a gestalt response, but leonroy, I hope you don't mind if I put it here. You are talking about what I want to talk about: solving a problem. ... Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. Suppose Dennis Cooper forgets his online banking password today. Does Google have a responsibility to somehow deliver the forgot password email? Did not the initial Gmail marketing say something like "This will be free forever! Don't delete your old mail, archive it! Use search on the records of your own life!" Sounds like a utility to me. The law isn't always right. Times change, for example. I believe that 1. the majority of individuals aren't TOS savvy and 2. the majority of individuals believe that they have a right to a persistent email account. If property laws and corporate policies and user habits tend to visit tragedy on users... Well, something should change! The USAmerican Congress does have a history of designing rules to serve the common good and forcing tech giants to play by those rules. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934 One rule could be that service providers must make a reasonable effort to give users their data in a functional, useful form in the event of account termination. For the good of society. Another might be that critical services (online banking password recovery) cannot be revoked without due process. Oh, does that one cause a big effing problem for Gmail, Outlook.com, etc? Well so be it. Online service providers made that problem for themselves when they fought tooth and nail to become important parts of everyone's lives. This kind of thing is what Government is FOR. Title II of the 1934 Comms Act required interoperability between networks. In modern times, that might mean implementing a open format, or open protocol. Maybe another rule would prohibit offering a message delivery service to consumers if said service doesn't implement an open protocol.

leonroy 10y ago
> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way. I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc. https://todoport.com/index.html https://todoport.com/index.html In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider. It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least! Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services. I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.

leonroy 10y ago

> Someday, maybe today, we have to ask ourselves if email (Gmail) is a public utility. That's an interesting way of looking at it and you're right, Google's initial approach to marketing the product did frame it in that way. I think it's going to become increasingly important for users to be able to pull their data out of a system and migrate it to another. Open APIs for pulling data out would be a great start and there are already nascent efforts to make migration of data from one cloud hosted service to another possible. For example Todoport here converts tasks between all the major task list managers like Asana, Wunderlist, Trello, etc. https://todoport.com/index.html https://todoport.com/index.html In the above case of task managers I recently tried to switch from Things by Cultured Cloud to another service. The migration process was practically non-existent and I eventually ended up having to write a fairly large AppleScript to get my data out of Things into a CSV and then a Python script to push it up to my new Task List provider. It was a messy few days of scripting to say the least! Office365 to Google Apps or Dropbox to OneDrive in my opinion should be a one click migration and companies need to stop holding user's data to ransom to keep them on their services. I personally think pressure to make these changes will have to come from outside the industry since it's clear that all the major players are basically trying to duplicate each other's features in an effort to ensure their users stay within their own platforms.