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

[Norbert Bollow]

Michael Gurstein <gurstein at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think it is arguable that email is now what might be classified as both a
> utility http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Public+Utilities and
> an "essential service" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essential_services and
> would, I believe under certain circumstances (war for example) be treated as
> such by governments.  What that implies to me at least, is that there is the
> need for regulation to ensure a minimum level of service and service
> standards including in this instance a minimally acceptable and usable
> "help" function.

I would suggest that it suffices to classify email as a form of
correspondence.

I think that many people would agree with this classification. It is
in my opinion clearly less problematic than the notions of "public
utility" and "essential service".

If email is a form or correspondence, then it is covered by existing
international human rights law which says inter alia that no one shall
be subjected to arbitrary interference with his correspondence,
and that everyone has the right to protection of the law against
such interference. (International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights, article 17.)

In my view this implies both the aspect that I've been emphasizing
(that it's wrong to close down a user's email address without warning,
in reaction to actions of the user that the user could reasonably
assume were acceptable) and the aspect that you've been emphasizing
(Google's choice of making themselves very hard to be contacted
effectively by someone whose gmail address is no longer working.)

And it furthermore implies that effective legal remedies must exist.

But as I wrote before, legislative action to create new laws to
specifically implement these email related human rights, or legal
action to create caselaw to the same effect, is not what I'd like to
see happen unless there's first a reasonable consensus-oriented
standardization process to define, in a broadly acceptable and
technically and economically sensible way, what is and what is not
acceptable behavior of email service providers, so that that
"protection of the law against such interference" would consist in
national law that just defines penalties for noncompliance with a
certain Internet Standard, maybe together with rules of procedure for
enforcement etc. But the substantive specifications of what is and 
what is not acceptable behavior of email service providers should IMO
not be defined at the national level, and certainly not by a group of
people whose understanding of the Internet is much less profound than
their understanding of a specific national legal system!

Otherwise, due to a variety of forces including the international and
interconnected nature of the Internet, one powerful country's legal
system will unavoidably to a large extent end up being exported to
other countries without giving them any real choice in the matter, in
violation of the right of peoples to democratic self-determination,
which is also a human right. Actually this is a problem that exists
already, in particular in the area of "intellectual property" law, but
we don't need to make the situation worse by expanding this wrongness
of legal imperialiasm to more areas of law.

Greetings,
Norbert

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