[governance] Blogpost: Gmail Hell Day 4: Dealing with the Borg (Or “Being Evil” Without Really Thinking About It

[Norbert Bollow]

McTim <dogwallah at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/27/12, Norbert Bollow <nb at bollow.ch> wrote:
> > Michael Gurstein <mgurst at vcn.bc.ca> wrote:
> >
> >> Folks may be interested in my current experiences in the online world.
> >>
> >> http://gurstein.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/gmail-hell-day-4-dealing-with-the-borg-or-being-evil-without-really-thinking-about-it/
> >
> > Thanks a lot for documenting this experience and thereby an issue that
> > Internet governance needs to address.
> 
> Why does "Internet governance" need to address this?  It's a free
> (best effort) service...OF COURSE they won't have an army of people
> helping you with your email?

In this particular case, Mike was in fact paying Google actual money
for this service, because he wanted a bigger mailbox than what they
offer for free, but that's not very relevant to the main point here
as I see it.

> I see no problem that needs solving here... PEBKAC, no?

In my eyes, it is a problem when an essential (to a particular end-user)
infrastructure, that the end-user relies on for important things, can
suddenly become unavailable for days without any reasonably way to
solve the problem.

Note that "simply start using a different email address" is *not* a
reasonable way to solve the problem, when there's no reasonable way
to notify everyone who has the old email address.

Maybe it should be recommended for everyone to use a domain name of
their own for their email? Of course, in developing countries, a lot
of people have an income which is so low in terms of dollars that it
would be prohibitively expensive to use a second-level .com or
comparitively priced domain name for this, but nothing would stop
e.g. CCTLD operators from using their existing infrastructure to offer
e.g. inexpensive third-level domain registrations under a special
second-level domain under their CCTLD.

Google and others could still offer to provide the essential same
email service. People would use it by setting up an MX DNS record
pointing to e.g. googlemail.com - but with this kind of setup, they'd
be able to switch to a different email service provider when they want,
for example if Google suddenly decides to stop providing their service
for a particular email address, like they did in Mike's case.

Greetings,
Norbert

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