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Let's see. So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services, and possibly your mai

Let's see. So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services, and possibly your main point of contact. Then you mention something innocuous, I don't know, a cucumber maybe, on YouTube in a comment, and now your account is gone because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang or a secret pedophile ring slang, and you got reported into oblivion. Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too. The hoops you have now to jump are worse than changing spelling of your legal name or changing the fucking citizenship. Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off". Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place. The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. They've made it extremely difficult, at least. They got, in some sense, bigger than many individual governments in regulating information channels. And yet they dodge all responsibility on the premise of being "private companies". What a wonderful world to be living in.

CA0DA 5y ago
> just self-host your email I have a personal domain name that I host email through Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any delivery issues.
- zensavona 5y ago
  You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.
- naturalauction 5y ago
  On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I’ve been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting sooner, your average user can’t be expected to deal with the hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Namecheap has a service called Private Email. If you bought your domain with Namecheap and pay for email they set MX records and all the dkim / dmarc stuff for you. It is quite easy and is pretty cheap. I am guessing other domain registrars have a similar feature.
- Aicy 5y ago
  Using your own domain is not self hosting, you are still using Protonmail's servers to receive and store your emails.
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    I think that’s their point. They have the benefit of a custom domain and they pay a good provider to host it for them. I self-host my email on a VPS and have been doing so for many many years. But for a startup that I am a part of, I said we buy mail hosting from Proton mail and so we did. Probably eventually I will also begin hosting my personal mail with Proton mail because honestly the intermittent deliverability problems that I’ve been having through all these years with my self-hosted mail are a bit of an annoyance. Mostly it happens that I am marked as spam when mailing someone that has never sent mail to me yet. But I don’t send much email with that address anyways, mostly just receive, and rarely to new people, so it hasn’t been a priority. For a while I was thinking of starting a paid email service of my own, but I just don’t think it’ll be worth the time to try and get into that market. But the idea was that if I was making money from it then I could spend the time to run such a service for many people and have employees to help me run it.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I wonder if government provided personal domains that you could point to popular providers of services using a simple control panel might be a good idea (they could be on a separate tld).
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  Even if you use gmail for your domain’s email, you won’t lose your email address when google bans you. You will have to take an additional step of changing hosts to recover, but you aren’t stuck forever. At least that’s what I tell myself to avoid doing the work of changing email hosts for my family’s domain.
- commandlinefan 5y ago
  > I host email through Protonmail Until Protonmail kicks you off for some vaguely specified reason.
  - lifty 5y ago
    So then you switch your domain to a different provider. Of course, the real trouble is when you loose the actual domain.
dexen 5y ago
Mother of bad takes... let's consider the two alternatives. Every single example you name happens just the same under regulation / government bureaucracy. Replacing private services with government services or tight regulation of industry doesn't improve error rate nor incentives. Consider the three key differences: 1) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, it is legally and culturally considered your own fault - "you filled the form badly" or any other such. The error rate gets worse, if anything. 2) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, the media has little incentive to hound them persistently. Private companies buy advertising, and the media can push them until they do; conversely the government doesn't buy advertising, but instead can launch endless "lawfare" against journalists, thus making it rather unprofitable to hound them over - what legally and culturally is "your own fault" anyway. That's mis-aligned incentives. 3) There's no competing government to come to, unless you're willing to uproot your whole family and move abroad. And in particularly egregious cases even that is either illegal or made difficult and lengthy - hey, we're having a pandemic right now. That we know and obsess over the mistakes and problems caused by private service providers is prim and proper - as it is thanks to the interest of journalists and aligned incentives. The same would largely pass unnoticed and at larger scale, under regulation / bureaucracy. So let's not go backwards, shall we? The third option, un-coordinated / de-centralized services are technically feasible, but quite hard to successfully build for organizational & financial reasons. Presumably we will get there eventually.
- coldtea 5y ago
  You missed how with government there are laws, the requirement to serve everybody, and legal recourses to most offenses. A private company like Google can kill your Gmail like that, and that's it, they don't even owe you a reason. It's their "right" to do whatever.
  - dexen 5y ago
    Not at all: just like platforms "suspend" account and may un-suspend it at their discretion, the government arrests suspects and confiscates property for evidence. That it ends after a year or two is of no help - the business is ruined, the person's good name is ruined. At least with the private platforms online our fellow users give us the presumption of innocence after a "suspension". Conversely, having been arrested or indicted is a long-lasting blemish. Government and regulated institutions have endless ways of denying service - whether by finding procedural errors or by stalling. Iron property of bureaucracy. For example: KYC and AML laws hurt small businesses at random, including countless PayPal drama stories. Again the difference is in culture and in reporting: account "suspended" is often reported and perceived as unjust and raise understandable outrage (the egregious cases aside), while legal proceedings are usually reported and perceived as just and proper. My point is, if we were to change the private platforms to strict regulation or outright government provided services, almost all suspensions would be reported and perceived as the user's own fault, and probably for the better of the society. Which puts the incentives of such supposed service-provider completely out of whack. Case in point: a government-provided account would be suspended "for the duration of investigation into spreading misleading information about health/elections/finances/etc.", and reporters and people would largely shrug it off as "well that's for the better". Oh and trying to open an account with another government would raise all sorts of red flags, naturally.
josephg 5y ago
Yep exactly. The way I’ve been thinking about it lately is that we live with a foot in two worlds. In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments, councils and countries we form part of in a participatory process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or get involved in the local political process. As a society we spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do. On the Internet, we absconded from our collective responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around creating “free” services. You don’t want to pay for infrastructure? No problem. We’ll cover the bill, so long as you don’t mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you directly. Don’t like the spaces we created? We’ll aim some of the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don’t live in the US? We don’t care. We’re in charge and we’re enforcing American “decency” standards on everyone. Don’t like the feudal empire we built? You’re welcome to delete your account and banish yourself from our society. If we don’t do that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other feudalist corporate empires down the road. We’re all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around us. We’re paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has created in a desperate attempt to maximise “engagement”. All so we can show more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society crumbles in the process. We’re kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising shareholder value is held in higher regard than our responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children. Help us all, but we need to do better than this.
- FridayoLeary 5y ago
  I think recognising the internet as a utility would go a long way to solving most problems with it. Enter hordes and hordes of bureaucrats and regulators. maybe not, but I'm sure a middle ground exists but were not there yet.
lvncelot 5y ago
>Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe I would go further and say good luck self-hosting your email at all if you're a Joe Schmoe. Being able to do that can't be expected of everyone, so for the individual (especially the individual reading hackernews) it might be a way around the problem - but it's not a solution.
- WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  Well, good luck setting up even a Joe Schmoe Email Services Company whose email is deliverable. In the other HN thread about self-hosted email I've heard it essentially amounts to paying for racket protection so the big players don't "oops we accidentally blacklisted you, good luck trying to rectify that" you.
- iammisc 5y ago
  Self-hosting e-mail is exceptionally easy. I've been doing it for almost a year now without problems. In fact, it's easier than a service. I use https://nixos-mailserver.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/latest/pdf/ https://nixos-mailserver.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/lates... and rent space in a data center, so to cloud IP space. But expecting non-technical people to do it would be a nightmare, that I agree with.
cblconfederate 5y ago
> The big companies Governments all over the world use email nowadays for all kinds of their own services, but which country offers free email to all their citizens? What about social networking or search? State broadcasters have existed for decades, yet nothing exists as fallback from big tech.
- luckylion 5y ago
  Would you want to use an email account provided by your government? State broadcasters are a good point, but we tend to claim they aren't really "by the state" but "by the public", and thus independent from the state. Countries that don't do that (e.g. Russia, China) have invested heavily to have their local versions of Google, Facebook & friends.
  - l-lousy 5y ago
    I would use one as a source of universal online ID in account recovery, not for everyday use
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    If it were e2e encrypted or had the same rules as the post office has to follow about when they can spy on your mail I would be fine with it.
    - dantheman 5y ago
      The post office tracks who sends mail to who for everyone.
  - Aerroon 5y ago
    Estonia gives a government email address to its citizens. I use it for some real world services, especially related to government. I kind of regret it, because the address is now inundated with spam. Apparently some of these services made that information publicly available.
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
elric 5y ago
It gets better. There is no way to appeal these decisions. There is no way to talk to an actual human being at $megacorp. You can't even rely on the legal system, because $megacorp has terms of use which you probably agreed to. Even if there were a way to go for a legal appeal, even defining something as simple as the appropriate court (even country!) would be an uphill battle.
- softveda 5y ago
  India is trying. Under new IT rules 2021 social media intermediaries have to publish the name of an actual Compliance Officer based in India and acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and resolve within 15v days. Twitter was forced to do it, almost on the verge of getting banned. So was Facebook and WhatsApp.
  - onionisafruit 5y ago
    It seems that there’s a lot of room for resolving the complaint within 15 days to just be the compliance officer rubber stamping whatever decision is being appealed. I hope that’s not the case though.
  - pkphilip 5y ago
    India's "compliance officer" demand is not for the corporation to look into customer issues. The compliance officer's role is to look into only censoring of content and does not AT ALL include looking into customer support issues. The "Compliance Officer" job is for the Indian government to have a neck to squeeze if that social media company allows some content on their site which doesn't toe the official line from the Indian government.
- tjpnz 5y ago
  Can't find the link right now but there was a case where someone took Google to small claims over an AdSense issue and won. The paralegal Google sent did try to argue that they were in the right per ToS but the judge still ordered them to pay.
ashtonkem 5y ago
> Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off". This is pretty disingenuous. Most of these arguments are about whether or not you can have a Twitter account, tying it to you losing a gmail account is to twist other people’s arguments around.
- josephcsible 5y ago
  How so? What's an argument that Twitter should be able to ban whoever they want, that wouldn't apply equally to Gmail?
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    Because the consequences of losing access to Twitter and your personal email are different, and we should treat them differently? Email is much closer to a phone than say, Twitter or FB. Losing the ability to post on Twitter is annoying, but losing your email can have devastating consequences that OP delineated.
    - josephcsible 5y ago
      Indeed, losing email would be worse, but the usual arguments to let Twitter ban whoever they want don't rely on the premise that getting banned from Twitter isn't that bad.
      - ashtonkem 5y ago
        They absolutely do depend on the premise that getting banned from Twitter isn’t that bad. I’ve made this exact argument here many times before; Twitter doesn’t rise to the level of ubiquity and necessity for us to consider classifying it as a common carrier. Meanwhile I absolutely can see some argument for email getting such a classification. Any time that we discuss whether or not the government should step in and curtail the actions of a private party, we are explicitly or implicitly balancing the harm of government interference against the harm that such a private action might cause.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
There ought to be something like eviction rights for certain quintessential Internet services. Requirements to warn users, give a reason and chance to rectify, before an outright ban in which the user has a generous time frame to move their data. Your landlord is a "private entity" but you're still a human being.
- iammisc 5y ago
  This is exactly it. Governments have no problem interfering deeply in the private sector when it comes to enforcing the public policy. We need that for the internet. Even worse, when it comes to real estate, the government has no problem interfering in the livelihoods of landlords (often small operations), but completely absconds its responsibility on the internet dealing with giant billion-dollar corporations.
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of how much governments should interfere, but the manner in which they should. Some analogue to eviction rights is a fantastic idea. But the political winds are trending sharply in the other direction, pushing more responsibility onto services for aggressive enforcement of what people say or do on their platforms. In an ideal world, the guilty would be rapidly and firmly dealt with while the innocent would be protected, but this is a million miles from the reality of how enforcement at scale works. It's a game of false positives vs false negatives, and we've recently been steering hard in the direction of diminishing user protections. If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places.
    - edgyquant 5y ago
      >If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places. It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any leftist message board and ask them what they think of liberals.)
wutbrodo 5y ago
I share your general concern here, but this is not how email-based service logins work. Excluding account creation and password resets, third-party services don't require you to access your email every time you log into them. For the most part, the login process simply treats the address as an identifier. The actual consequence of the scenario you describe would be logging in to each service and changing the email address associated with it. But the idea that you'd be locked out, especially from your money, is just not realistic.
- choeger 5y ago
  Did you ever came across the wonderful "sign in with Google" functionality?
  - wutbrodo 5y ago
    That's a good point. Though it is an importantly different point: it's trivial to avoid this feature, to the point that I've never once used it. (Though I gather that there have started to be exceptions, as with dating apps. If this becomes more widespread, I'd agree with your concern)
- abdullahkhalids 5y ago
  My bank uses 2FA in which they send a pin to my email on login (I know it's not the most secure thing, but it is what is being used). Though if I lost access to my email, I can go to my bank branch with identification to get it changed in 2-3 business days - during which time I won't have access to a number of online banking services. Steam also has the same system.
perihelions 5y ago
[edit: This comment is wrong, see the top reply] "The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet." It's an edge case (one small country), but in New Zealand you currently can't exist *in public* without either iOS or Android. They've universally deployed a covid-related tracking app, which has been made mandatory this week, and only supports those two platforms. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavirus-qr-scanning-manually-signing-in-compulsory-at-all-alert-levels.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavir... https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
- hypersoar 5y ago
  > in New Zealand you currently you can't exist in public without either iOS or Android. This sounds too insane and stupid to be true. Because it isn't. From your second link: > If you can’t use the app, download the NZ COVID Tracer booklet, keep a calendar or diary or take photos so you can recall where you’ve been. Moreover, it looks like this is more about getting businesses etc to get people to log their visits. Like masked mandates in the United States, I would guess that this isn't about making sure that individuals who don't comply are dragged away by the cops.
josephcsible 5y ago
> Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place. Or worse, what happens if you do that, but then your domain registrar or ISP decides to cancel you? Or Gmail decides to block messages to or from your server?
- lifty 5y ago
  It's almost impossible to get full digital sovereignty with existing widely deployed Internet tooling. For the domain part, something like Handshake could give us full digital sovereignty, but more people need to use it in order to make it useful.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Yes, I have recently started to suspect that the trend may lead to "Possibly undesirable terms, expressions or ideas, false information, possible hate speech in your SMS texting: telephone number suspended". Or, on a lighter side: "Our systems have detected that you address to your partners-in-fun inappropriately".
shadowgovt 5y ago
The other practical solution from "host yourself" is "maintain, in the long-term, multiple email accounts with multiple providers" so the blast radius of running afoul of one of these providers is curtailed. Fine advice, but in practice few people are willing to shoulder the inconvenience of doing it (and the bookkeeping to preserve it). Ironically, this is one of those places where in the US, government intervention could help... Not with regulation, but with service provision. A ".citizen.us" account provided through a federal bureau could be constrained legally in ways that a private email account currently cannot and serve as an authorization provider for citizens who don't want to entrust their digital identity to a megacorporation.
uniqueid 5y ago
Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too. There must be a billion ways to implement account deletion without this happening. The first one that comes to mind is giving the user 6 months of email-only access (so they can move to a webmail provider who will tolerate them). At any rate, the root cause is that Gmail, the world's largest webmail service, is affiliated with the world's largest search engine and the world's largest repository of video. Never mind this essay about social media, the connection between these three services is a ridiculous, dangerous thing.
- Falling3 5y ago
  Yea, the multiple uses of a single account strikes me as the bigger issue here. Why would my email access by tied to my ability to comment on a video sharing website? Same issue as Oculus requiring a facebook account.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I disagree, it’s the tying of your email address to a provider. If your email goes to “first@lastname.com”, then a quick MX change side steps a Google ban trivially. But if your email address is “name@provider.com”, you’re kind of screwed.
    - MandieD 5y ago
      Now the problem is making the acquisition, setup and maintenance of personal domain names and mapping to an email account something the average literate adult can manage. …and chuckling ruefully as I recall walking recent college grads who are far better devs than I am through what needed to happen for SendGrid to actually work for one of their project, having to start with “what is an MX record?” and “where is that controlled?”
SllX 5y ago
You’re not going to lose access to your bank accounts merely from losing an email address. At worse you’ll be inconvenienced for a day, and maybe not even that long because with a phone call and your SSN and account number, you can get anything you need done including a change of email address for your online banking. Every financial or governmental institution is going to have some kind of failsafe for verifying you if you lose access to an email address. If you’re worried about being put into a position that you’ll never have what you need to recover from a loss of an email address, then the onus is on you to make sure that doesn’t happen. I know you had a larger argument you were articulating, but it was undermined by your example.
dundarious 5y ago
In my experience, the "they are a private company..." argument is quite often given as an ironic or sarcastic retort, pointing out a perceived inconsistency or hypocrisy, rather than a statement that "actually, the system works". More of a "by your own logic...".
asdff 5y ago
Most bank accounts use a username rather than an email for logging in (at least for all of mine), and if you forget your password and don't have access to the email you can revert to the 1990s way of doing things seamlessly and call up the bank or even visit a branch.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account Huh? I've never seen that happen. Banks have you set up a username.
- unraveller 5y ago
  Canada has a very ingrained official email money transfer system.
ineedasername 5y ago
My email account is not part of my online banking authentication process, and I don't think there's an option to do so. Though it seems the authentication process is not robustly secure anyway: a username & password combined with a personal question if it hasn't detected a login from your machine recently.
somewhatbetter 5y ago
>you have an email address at Gmail Gmail is not the only provider. Host your own mail. You will have to learn baroque things like operating systems, networking, etc., but it is doable. >on YouTube Create your own platform or deplatform those who dislike your "cucumber". >because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang Yeah, icecream can lick back. >your bank account Make your own bank or deplatform the existing ones. They also need water/internet, right? Call the providers, they will cancel their subscription to keep their renome inmaculate. >"it's not censorship if a private company is doing it" Why do you want to use services where things like this can happen? >without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. Many people really greatful for this. >What a wonderful world to be living in. Sorry, it will be hard to swallow but you picked this timeline. Now instead of crying try to make the best out of it.
nashashmi 5y ago
Thank you for pointing this out. When a company also serves as a universal login system, who the hell gave them the right to block you from accessing those third party services because you did not comply with the rules on only THEIR system?!
brnt 5y ago
A habit I picked up due to frequent computer system reinstalls (intentional and no): learn to be resilient to system failures. Know how to setup your system on a whim, and learn to forego too much pointless configuration, learn how to deal with doing the same takes on different OSes/distros. I practise the same with email (and other coords): make sure changing them is easy, and do it occasionally to test if you've thought it through. Compartmentalize by having a number of adresses. You'll learn how to combine being lazy with being resilient, instead of just lazy and complacent. One email address at a company which you cannot hold accountable should not and in fact is not your identity. Prove to yourself it isn't and in that process learn how to deal with moving your identity (since that is how email is used nowadays).
Barrin92 5y ago
It's a pretty big stretch to generalize from your particular example, Google as a credential provider, to private internet firms altogether. In the case of the Google login you're actually right. Once you get booted off it you'll have a problem. But this doesn't hold for all private firms. If you get kicked off Twitter you're just kicked off Twitter, it doesn't impact your ability to make payments or go about your day. Same for TikTok, whatever else have you. There's a particular class of applications, identity and payment providers namely for which you can make a good case that they're infrastructure of sorts, but it doesn't really extend to the majority of digital services.

CA0DA 5y ago

> just self-host your email I have a personal domain name that I host email through Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any delivery issues.

zensavona 5y ago
You don't self-host, you pay Protonmail to host it for you. A step above Gmail but not what the commenter was referring to.
naturalauction 5y ago
On the other hand, I have a personal domain name that I’ve been using through (ironically) gmail for over a decade. It was set up before dkim and dmarc and I (stupidly) never implemented them. A few days ago I realized that some of my emails were being filtered to spam on Gmail (who knows for how long). While it was totally my fault for not acting sooner, your average user can’t be expected to deal with the hassle of using your own domain name, let alone self hosting.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Namecheap has a service called Private Email. If you bought your domain with Namecheap and pay for email they set MX records and all the dkim / dmarc stuff for you. It is quite easy and is pretty cheap. I am guessing other domain registrars have a similar feature.
Aicy 5y ago
Using your own domain is not self hosting, you are still using Protonmail's servers to receive and store your emails.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  I think that’s their point. They have the benefit of a custom domain and they pay a good provider to host it for them. I self-host my email on a VPS and have been doing so for many many years. But for a startup that I am a part of, I said we buy mail hosting from Proton mail and so we did. Probably eventually I will also begin hosting my personal mail with Proton mail because honestly the intermittent deliverability problems that I’ve been having through all these years with my self-hosted mail are a bit of an annoyance. Mostly it happens that I am marked as spam when mailing someone that has never sent mail to me yet. But I don’t send much email with that address anyways, mostly just receive, and rarely to new people, so it hasn’t been a priority. For a while I was thinking of starting a paid email service of my own, but I just don’t think it’ll be worth the time to try and get into that market. But the idea was that if I was making money from it then I could spend the time to run such a service for many people and have employees to help me run it.
nicoburns 5y ago
I wonder if government provided personal domains that you could point to popular providers of services using a simple control panel might be a good idea (they could be on a separate tld).
onionisafruit 5y ago
Even if you use gmail for your domain’s email, you won’t lose your email address when google bans you. You will have to take an additional step of changing hosts to recover, but you aren’t stuck forever. At least that’s what I tell myself to avoid doing the work of changing email hosts for my family’s domain.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> I host email through Protonmail Until Protonmail kicks you off for some vaguely specified reason.
- lifty 5y ago
  So then you switch your domain to a different provider. Of course, the real trouble is when you loose the actual domain.

dexen 5y ago

Mother of bad takes... let's consider the two alternatives. Every single example you name happens just the same under regulation / government bureaucracy. Replacing private services with government services or tight regulation of industry doesn't improve error rate nor incentives. Consider the three key differences: 1) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, it is legally and culturally considered your own fault - "you filled the form badly" or any other such. The error rate gets worse, if anything. 2) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, the media has little incentive to hound them persistently. Private companies buy advertising, and the media can push them until they do; conversely the government doesn't buy advertising, but instead can launch endless "lawfare" against journalists, thus making it rather unprofitable to hound them over - what legally and culturally is "your own fault" anyway. That's mis-aligned incentives. 3) There's no competing government to come to, unless you're willing to uproot your whole family and move abroad. And in particularly egregious cases even that is either illegal or made difficult and lengthy - hey, we're having a pandemic right now. That we know and obsess over the mistakes and problems caused by private service providers is prim and proper - as it is thanks to the interest of journalists and aligned incentives. The same would largely pass unnoticed and at larger scale, under regulation / bureaucracy. So let's not go backwards, shall we? The third option, un-coordinated / de-centralized services are technically feasible, but quite hard to successfully build for organizational & financial reasons. Presumably we will get there eventually.

coldtea 5y ago
You missed how with government there are laws, the requirement to serve everybody, and legal recourses to most offenses. A private company like Google can kill your Gmail like that, and that's it, they don't even owe you a reason. It's their "right" to do whatever.
- dexen 5y ago
  Not at all: just like platforms "suspend" account and may un-suspend it at their discretion, the government arrests suspects and confiscates property for evidence. That it ends after a year or two is of no help - the business is ruined, the person's good name is ruined. At least with the private platforms online our fellow users give us the presumption of innocence after a "suspension". Conversely, having been arrested or indicted is a long-lasting blemish. Government and regulated institutions have endless ways of denying service - whether by finding procedural errors or by stalling. Iron property of bureaucracy. For example: KYC and AML laws hurt small businesses at random, including countless PayPal drama stories. Again the difference is in culture and in reporting: account "suspended" is often reported and perceived as unjust and raise understandable outrage (the egregious cases aside), while legal proceedings are usually reported and perceived as just and proper. My point is, if we were to change the private platforms to strict regulation or outright government provided services, almost all suspensions would be reported and perceived as the user's own fault, and probably for the better of the society. Which puts the incentives of such supposed service-provider completely out of whack. Case in point: a government-provided account would be suspended "for the duration of investigation into spreading misleading information about health/elections/finances/etc.", and reporters and people would largely shrug it off as "well that's for the better". Oh and trying to open an account with another government would raise all sorts of red flags, naturally.

josephg 5y ago

Yep exactly. The way I’ve been thinking about it lately is that we live with a foot in two worlds. In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments, councils and countries we form part of in a participatory process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or get involved in the local political process. As a society we spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do. On the Internet, we absconded from our collective responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around creating “free” services. You don’t want to pay for infrastructure? No problem. We’ll cover the bill, so long as you don’t mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you directly. Don’t like the spaces we created? We’ll aim some of the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don’t live in the US? We don’t care. We’re in charge and we’re enforcing American “decency” standards on everyone. Don’t like the feudal empire we built? You’re welcome to delete your account and banish yourself from our society. If we don’t do that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other feudalist corporate empires down the road. We’re all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around us. We’re paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has created in a desperate attempt to maximise “engagement”. All so we can show more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society crumbles in the process. We’re kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising shareholder value is held in higher regard than our responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children. Help us all, but we need to do better than this.

FridayoLeary 5y ago
I think recognising the internet as a utility would go a long way to solving most problems with it. Enter hordes and hordes of bureaucrats and regulators. maybe not, but I'm sure a middle ground exists but were not there yet.

lvncelot 5y ago

>Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe I would go further and say good luck self-hosting your email at all if you're a Joe Schmoe. Being able to do that can't be expected of everyone, so for the individual (especially the individual reading hackernews) it might be a way around the problem - but it's not a solution.

WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
Well, good luck setting up even a Joe Schmoe Email Services Company whose email is deliverable. In the other HN thread about self-hosted email I've heard it essentially amounts to paying for racket protection so the big players don't "oops we accidentally blacklisted you, good luck trying to rectify that" you.
iammisc 5y ago
Self-hosting e-mail is exceptionally easy. I've been doing it for almost a year now without problems. In fact, it's easier than a service. I use https://nixos-mailserver.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/latest/pdf/ https://nixos-mailserver.readthedocs.io/_/downloads/en/lates... and rent space in a data center, so to cloud IP space. But expecting non-technical people to do it would be a nightmare, that I agree with.

cblconfederate 5y ago

> The big companies Governments all over the world use email nowadays for all kinds of their own services, but which country offers free email to all their citizens? What about social networking or search? State broadcasters have existed for decades, yet nothing exists as fallback from big tech.

luckylion 5y ago
Would you want to use an email account provided by your government? State broadcasters are a good point, but we tend to claim they aren't really "by the state" but "by the public", and thus independent from the state. Countries that don't do that (e.g. Russia, China) have invested heavily to have their local versions of Google, Facebook & friends.
- l-lousy 5y ago
  I would use one as a source of universal online ID in account recovery, not for everyday use
- fallingknife 5y ago
  If it were e2e encrypted or had the same rules as the post office has to follow about when they can spy on your mail I would be fine with it.
  - dantheman 5y ago
    The post office tracks who sends mail to who for everyone.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  Estonia gives a government email address to its citizens. I use it for some real world services, especially related to government. I kind of regret it, because the address is now inundated with spam. Apparently some of these services made that information publicly available.
- cblconfederate 5y ago

elric 5y ago

It gets better. There is no way to appeal these decisions. There is no way to talk to an actual human being at $megacorp. You can't even rely on the legal system, because $megacorp has terms of use which you probably agreed to. Even if there were a way to go for a legal appeal, even defining something as simple as the appropriate court (even country!) would be an uphill battle.

softveda 5y ago
India is trying. Under new IT rules 2021 social media intermediaries have to publish the name of an actual Compliance Officer based in India and acknowledge a complaint within 24 hours and resolve within 15v days. Twitter was forced to do it, almost on the verge of getting banned. So was Facebook and WhatsApp.
- onionisafruit 5y ago
  It seems that there’s a lot of room for resolving the complaint within 15 days to just be the compliance officer rubber stamping whatever decision is being appealed. I hope that’s not the case though.
- pkphilip 5y ago
  India's "compliance officer" demand is not for the corporation to look into customer issues. The compliance officer's role is to look into only censoring of content and does not AT ALL include looking into customer support issues. The "Compliance Officer" job is for the Indian government to have a neck to squeeze if that social media company allows some content on their site which doesn't toe the official line from the Indian government.
tjpnz 5y ago
Can't find the link right now but there was a case where someone took Google to small claims over an AdSense issue and won. The paralegal Google sent did try to argue that they were in the right per ToS but the judge still ordered them to pay.

ashtonkem 5y ago

> Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off". This is pretty disingenuous. Most of these arguments are about whether or not you can have a Twitter account, tying it to you losing a gmail account is to twist other people’s arguments around.

josephcsible 5y ago
How so? What's an argument that Twitter should be able to ban whoever they want, that wouldn't apply equally to Gmail?
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Because the consequences of losing access to Twitter and your personal email are different, and we should treat them differently? Email is much closer to a phone than say, Twitter or FB. Losing the ability to post on Twitter is annoying, but losing your email can have devastating consequences that OP delineated.
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    Indeed, losing email would be worse, but the usual arguments to let Twitter ban whoever they want don't rely on the premise that getting banned from Twitter isn't that bad.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      They absolutely do depend on the premise that getting banned from Twitter isn’t that bad. I’ve made this exact argument here many times before; Twitter doesn’t rise to the level of ubiquity and necessity for us to consider classifying it as a common carrier. Meanwhile I absolutely can see some argument for email getting such a classification. Any time that we discuss whether or not the government should step in and curtail the actions of a private party, we are explicitly or implicitly balancing the harm of government interference against the harm that such a private action might cause.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

There ought to be something like eviction rights for certain quintessential Internet services. Requirements to warn users, give a reason and chance to rectify, before an outright ban in which the user has a generous time frame to move their data. Your landlord is a "private entity" but you're still a human being.

iammisc 5y ago
This is exactly it. Governments have no problem interfering deeply in the private sector when it comes to enforcing the public policy. We need that for the internet. Even worse, when it comes to real estate, the government has no problem interfering in the livelihoods of landlords (often small operations), but completely absconds its responsibility on the internet dealing with giant billion-dollar corporations.
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  Unfortunately, this isn't just a question of how much governments should interfere, but the manner in which they should. Some analogue to eviction rights is a fantastic idea. But the political winds are trending sharply in the other direction, pushing more responsibility onto services for aggressive enforcement of what people say or do on their platforms. In an ideal world, the guilty would be rapidly and firmly dealt with while the innocent would be protected, but this is a million miles from the reality of how enforcement at scale works. It's a game of false positives vs false negatives, and we've recently been steering hard in the direction of diminishing user protections. If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    >If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places. It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any leftist message board and ask them what they think of liberals.)

wutbrodo 5y ago

I share your general concern here, but this is not how email-based service logins work. Excluding account creation and password resets, third-party services don't require you to access your email every time you log into them. For the most part, the login process simply treats the address as an identifier. The actual consequence of the scenario you describe would be logging in to each service and changing the email address associated with it. But the idea that you'd be locked out, especially from your money, is just not realistic.

choeger 5y ago
Did you ever came across the wonderful "sign in with Google" functionality?
- wutbrodo 5y ago
  That's a good point. Though it is an importantly different point: it's trivial to avoid this feature, to the point that I've never once used it. (Though I gather that there have started to be exceptions, as with dating apps. If this becomes more widespread, I'd agree with your concern)
abdullahkhalids 5y ago
My bank uses 2FA in which they send a pin to my email on login (I know it's not the most secure thing, but it is what is being used). Though if I lost access to my email, I can go to my bank branch with identification to get it changed in 2-3 business days - during which time I won't have access to a number of online banking services. Steam also has the same system.

perihelions 5y ago

[edit: This comment is wrong, see the top reply] "The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet." It's an edge case (one small country), but in New Zealand you currently can't exist *in public* without either iOS or Android. They've universally deployed a covid-related tracking app, which has been made mandatory this week, and only supports those two platforms. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavirus-qr-scanning-manually-signing-in-compulsory-at-all-alert-levels.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavir... https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/covid-19-novel-coronavirus/covid-19-resources-and-tools/nz-covid-tracer-app https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

hypersoar 5y ago
> in New Zealand you currently you can't exist in public without either iOS or Android. This sounds too insane and stupid to be true. Because it isn't. From your second link: > If you can’t use the app, download the NZ COVID Tracer booklet, keep a calendar or diary or take photos so you can recall where you’ve been. Moreover, it looks like this is more about getting businesses etc to get people to log their visits. Like masked mandates in the United States, I would guess that this isn't about making sure that individuals who don't comply are dragged away by the cops.

josephcsible 5y ago

> Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place. Or worse, what happens if you do that, but then your domain registrar or ISP decides to cancel you? Or Gmail decides to block messages to or from your server?

lifty 5y ago
It's almost impossible to get full digital sovereignty with existing widely deployed Internet tooling. For the domain part, something like Handshake could give us full digital sovereignty, but more people need to use it in order to make it useful.
mdp2021 5y ago
Yes, I have recently started to suspect that the trend may lead to "Possibly undesirable terms, expressions or ideas, false information, possible hate speech in your SMS texting: telephone number suspended". Or, on a lighter side: "Our systems have detected that you address to your partners-in-fun inappropriately".

shadowgovt 5y ago

The other practical solution from "host yourself" is "maintain, in the long-term, multiple email accounts with multiple providers" so the blast radius of running afoul of one of these providers is curtailed. Fine advice, but in practice few people are willing to shoulder the inconvenience of doing it (and the bookkeeping to preserve it). Ironically, this is one of those places where in the US, government intervention could help... Not with regulation, but with service provision. A ".citizen.us" account provided through a federal bureau could be constrained legally in ways that a private email account currently cannot and serve as an authorization provider for citizens who don't want to entrust their digital identity to a megacorporation.

uniqueid 5y ago

Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too. There must be a billion ways to implement account deletion without this happening. The first one that comes to mind is giving the user 6 months of email-only access (so they can move to a webmail provider who will tolerate them). At any rate, the root cause is that Gmail, the world's largest webmail service, is affiliated with the world's largest search engine and the world's largest repository of video. Never mind this essay about social media, the connection between these three services is a ridiculous, dangerous thing.

Falling3 5y ago
Yea, the multiple uses of a single account strikes me as the bigger issue here. Why would my email access by tied to my ability to comment on a video sharing website? Same issue as Oculus requiring a facebook account.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I disagree, it’s the tying of your email address to a provider. If your email goes to “first@lastname.com”, then a quick MX change side steps a Google ban trivially. But if your email address is “name@provider.com”, you’re kind of screwed.
  - MandieD 5y ago
    Now the problem is making the acquisition, setup and maintenance of personal domain names and mapping to an email account something the average literate adult can manage. …and chuckling ruefully as I recall walking recent college grads who are far better devs than I am through what needed to happen for SendGrid to actually work for one of their project, having to start with “what is an MX record?” and “where is that controlled?”

SllX 5y ago

You’re not going to lose access to your bank accounts merely from losing an email address. At worse you’ll be inconvenienced for a day, and maybe not even that long because with a phone call and your SSN and account number, you can get anything you need done including a change of email address for your online banking. Every financial or governmental institution is going to have some kind of failsafe for verifying you if you lose access to an email address. If you’re worried about being put into a position that you’ll never have what you need to recover from a loss of an email address, then the onus is on you to make sure that doesn’t happen. I know you had a larger argument you were articulating, but it was undermined by your example.

dundarious 5y ago

In my experience, the "they are a private company..." argument is quite often given as an ironic or sarcastic retort, pointing out a perceived inconsistency or hypocrisy, rather than a statement that "actually, the system works". More of a "by your own logic...".

asdff 5y ago

Most bank accounts use a username rather than an email for logging in (at least for all of mine), and if you forget your password and don't have access to the email you can revert to the 1990s way of doing things seamlessly and call up the bank or even visit a branch.

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account Huh? I've never seen that happen. Banks have you set up a username.

unraveller 5y ago
Canada has a very ingrained official email money transfer system.

ineedasername 5y ago

My email account is not part of my online banking authentication process, and I don't think there's an option to do so. Though it seems the authentication process is not robustly secure anyway: a username & password combined with a personal question if it hasn't detected a login from your machine recently.

somewhatbetter 5y ago

>you have an email address at Gmail Gmail is not the only provider. Host your own mail. You will have to learn baroque things like operating systems, networking, etc., but it is doable. >on YouTube Create your own platform or deplatform those who dislike your "cucumber". >because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang Yeah, icecream can lick back. >your bank account Make your own bank or deplatform the existing ones. They also need water/internet, right? Call the providers, they will cancel their subscription to keep their renome inmaculate. >"it's not censorship if a private company is doing it" Why do you want to use services where things like this can happen? >without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. Many people really greatful for this. >What a wonderful world to be living in. Sorry, it will be hard to swallow but you picked this timeline. Now instead of crying try to make the best out of it.

nashashmi 5y ago

Thank you for pointing this out. When a company also serves as a universal login system, who the hell gave them the right to block you from accessing those third party services because you did not comply with the rules on only THEIR system?!

brnt 5y ago

A habit I picked up due to frequent computer system reinstalls (intentional and no): learn to be resilient to system failures. Know how to setup your system on a whim, and learn to forego too much pointless configuration, learn how to deal with doing the same takes on different OSes/distros. I practise the same with email (and other coords): make sure changing them is easy, and do it occasionally to test if you've thought it through. Compartmentalize by having a number of adresses. You'll learn how to combine being lazy with being resilient, instead of just lazy and complacent. One email address at a company which you cannot hold accountable should not and in fact is not your identity. Prove to yourself it isn't and in that process learn how to deal with moving your identity (since that is how email is used nowadays).

Barrin92 5y ago

It's a pretty big stretch to generalize from your particular example, Google as a credential provider, to private internet firms altogether. In the case of the Google login you're actually right. Once you get booted off it you'll have a problem. But this doesn't hold for all private firms. If you get kicked off Twitter you're just kicked off Twitter, it doesn't impact your ability to make payments or go about your day. Same for TikTok, whatever else have you. There's a particular class of applications, identity and payment providers namely for which you can make a good case that they're infrastructure of sorts, but it doesn't really extend to the majority of digital services.