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

Mon Feb 27 14:49:01 EST 2012

I remember nearly twenty years ago Michael Hart, the founder of Project
Gutenberg (a service which comes much closer than Gmail to what can be
described as 'free'), wishing wistfully for a technology which would
facilitate tiny payments - say 5c each. It seems that Google and Facebook
have managed to do just that by aggregating tiny pieces of information and
converting them into money later. We need economic capacity building too :-)

Many online services, paid and 'free', are offered 'warts and all', and
that is how we are forced to accept them. There's a rights issue here too,
and it's time that we begin to demand them.

Deirdre

On 27 February 2012 14:42, Michael Gurstein <mgurst at vcn.bc.ca> wrote:

> 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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-- 
“The fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge" Sir William
Arthur Lewis, Nobel Prize Economics, 1979
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