This is an interesting situation. Organizations are comfortable treating your email as your identity because email is freely, instantly available to anyone in

This is an interesting situation. Organizations are comfortable treating your email as your identity because email is freely, instantly available to anyone in the world with internet access. Email is free and massively available because it is cheap for providers to operate and ads make it profitable. Because organizations treat email as identity, email is very important to people’s lives, and losing access to your email account can be devastating. Thus there are calls for regulation requiring human intervention (such as customer support), the cost of which scales linearly. This kind of regulation seems incompatible with free, universally available, instant sign-up email. Ad revenue is probably not enough to hire support staff for millions of customers across dozens of languages. One half-hour support call probably costs more money than a customer generates in years through ad revenue. Correct me if I’m missing something, but it seems that providers would have to charge a fee for email to adequately support their customers. If this happens, then email access can no longer be assumed. So here’s the core of the question: if we are dissatisfied with how fragile our identities are online, who pays to fix this?