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

[Michael Gurstein]

I'm still not recovered... So sending this from a back-up account--notably
a community network that I at one time used as my primary account but
which I gave up for the siren song of gmail :(.  The Vancouver Community
Network has been providing volunteer based, free email service for about
15 years or so and has done it reliably and with remarkably little
downtime or system failure. Also, they are very responsive and just down
the road (I've been on their Board off and on for years... (There is I
think a significant message there as well...

But to reply to McTim (and Norbert)...

At one level my issues with gmail are consumer protection issues -- which
however, since they seem to be transnational it is hard to see who/how I
can invoke these (but I could be wrong...

But at a deeper level I think it is not simply protecting the consumer but
regulating a utility... My guess is that if we asked virtually any
population in the world the appropriate set of questions the result would
be that they experience email not as a "consumer good" but rather as a
necessary element of their day to day infrastructure as a citizen,
consumer, business operator, parent etc.etc. And that any significant
disruption would be experienced in more or less the same manner as a
disruption in any other significant utility/infrastructure of modern
life...

It is I think only a matter of time before this is widely recognized
politically and some sort of regulatory environment established--it is
probably only delayed because of the speed of evolution of the tech, the
technological illiteracy of most politicians (among the last groups in the
world to move into the email enabled world--according to studies in
various countries), and the difficulty of transnational regulation and the
absence of a framework through which such regulation could be introduced
and managed.

Your reference to PEBKAC is ridiculous... I'm reasonably
well-educated/informed/intelligent... I made best efforts as indicated in
my blog post and I found myself in gmail hell (where I still reside BTW...
I've been searching around in gmail "help" and found many other
people--some who appear rather more technically literate than myself
similarly lost somewhere in the antechamber of Kafka's Castle/trying to
communicate with the Borg (HAL?).. and from various comments and my blog
and particularly private emails many many other people have similar
problems... when a problem because sufficiently common it moves from being
the victims problem to being the originators' problem or at least it
should...

And as various other people have noted gmail is not a "free" (as in
benevolent) service... getting people to gmail--which Google has and
continues to aggressively attempt to do is part of their business model
where they take the information which folks using their mail service gives
them access to and they then sell that (at very considerable profit) to
various folks with an interest.

Best,

Mike


> 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
>
>
>
> !DSPAM:2676,4f4baf3a25622006457889!
>




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