In the physical world, we have a cascading set of governments, councils and countries we form part of in a participatory process. If someone is smoking next door I can raise it with the home owners association. Or my local council. Or if laws need to be changed, I can talk to my member of parliament or get involved in the local political process. As a society we spent thousands of years and countless deaths to reach this fragile place where we take collective responsibility for our shared spaces and communities. Who pays for the roads? We all do. Who sets the rules for public spaces? We all do.
On the Internet, we absconded from our collective responsibility to invest in shared infrastructure. So, absent other investment, a bunch of US corporations went around creating “free” services. You don’t want to pay for infrastructure? No problem. We’ll cover the bill, so long as you don’t mind us tracking you everywhere, selling information about you to advertising brokers, and advertising to you directly. Don’t like the spaces we created? We’ll aim some of the best AIs humans have ever created at your mind to algorithmically find your attentional weaknesses. All to keep you hooked on outrage, so we can show you more ads. You don’t live in the US? We don’t care. We’re in charge and we’re enforcing American “decency” standards on everyone. Don’t like the feudal empire we built? You’re welcome to delete your account and banish yourself from our society. If we don’t do that ourselves first, automatically. Good luck with the other feudalist corporate empires down the road.
We’re all paying for this as we watch social trust fray around us. We’re paying with a generation lost to outrage wars on Twitter, antivaxers on Facebook, the capital hill riots, teen suicide, conspiracy theories, and witch hunts. All pushed on people by algorithms that our community has created in a desperate attempt to maximise “engagement”. All so we can show more ads at any cost. Never mind if democratic liberal society crumbles in the process.
We’re kings of the world, and the only responsibility anyone can name is to the almighty dollar. Somehow maximising shareholder value is held in higher regard than our responsibility to leave a functioning society to our children. Help us all, but we need to do better than this.
This doesn't really work in practice though. For most people they keep their head down and hope that nobody finds fault with them, because everything is filled with so many rules and gotchas that you're almost guaranteed to be breaking some of them. You're supposed to follow rules that you don't even know. And this is considered fine by society, because as long as you keep your head down you're not going to be bothered.
The internet is the way it is because people in the real world are the way they are. When a real world business bans you on a technicality you don't really have recourse either.
It depends. In the EU, a bank account is deemed a right, as an essential utility.
If a bank bans a customer on a technicality, it could be construed as breaking this obligation.
Whether or not something like that could apply to something like an email address, however, is another question.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32...
But there are vanishingly few real world businesses that have the kind of editorial power Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have over what information people consume. The only other industry with that sort of power is the news industry. And they (at least used to) have very strict legal codes and professional ethical codes which hold them accountable to society. It’s not ok for journalists to slander people or give bogus medical advice. But somehow we think it’s fine if a witch hunt is trending on Twitter, or YouTube patiently convinces people that the earth is flat, or vaccines don’t work.
You can talk all you want about the sovereignty of businesses and I get it. The problem is, when those businesses are so big and form such an essential part of how people connect in society, we (society) collectively depend on those businesses to be responsible actors.
Not all governance is bad governance. Where did you get the idea that governments can only ever be part of the problem? There are plenty of people doing good work in the US government at every level. And plenty of world governments that work well. And plenty of historical examples of fantastic US public policy measures - like the space program.
And if government isn’t working properly, you think digital feudalism would work better? A world some rogue AI at Google is able to shut off your online life because they don’t like the contents of your email or Google docs. So they brick your gadgets and shut you off from the world. With no recourse or human appeal process. No thanks!
Recently I've been thinking along the lines that the bigger a company (or the larger their ability to influence, discriminate, and in doing so screw individuals over), the greater their social responsibility (roughly: provide the service they've set out to provide without discriminating and unjustly taking action against individuals any more than is necessary to prevent immediate harm & abuse).
That small mom & pop store? Sure, kick me out and ban me if you don't like the shade of my mask or my manner of speech; I will look for another place to shop. The two big chains that own virtually every grocery store and supermarket in town? Well it's going to be very inconvenient for individuals to be rejected by these behemoths.
Private or not shouldn't matter, there are many companies who have huge potential to mess with your ability to live a normal life and participate in society and do all the things that other people can do.
And I really think this social responsibility should extend to all services, not just ones that the customer pays money for. So deep pockets and the ability to offer lucrative free services that largely displace competition shouldn't relieve a company of their responsibility. If anything, these seem to give them immense power and huge potential to screw people over.
The internet and online platforms are important but still just a part of the issue.. which is that corporations take over our cities and lives but have essentially no obligation to serve you.
That conversation is where things get muddled up.
Now we are in a much weirder situation where services to use the utility are provided by companies you don't have a direct utility provider relationship with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's a new thing that doesn't follow the traditional "rules" and analogy models of traditional utilities. If you have electrical problems you call your energy company. If you have telephone problems you call your phone company. If you have internet problems you can't just call your ISP to fix them.
I think a lot of these growing pains with "is the internet a utility?" and "is email a utility?" and "is Facebook a utility?" are happening precisely because we've passed a boundary of what "utility" means both governmentally and culturally. When your ISP was your email provider, the government had power to regulate it is a utility service: if your ISP didn't support things that kept you safe the government in theory could mandate it as a part of the limited regional monopoly rights granted to an ISP. When Google is your email provider the government has no such rights, and yet Google has far and away de facto become much of a "regional monopoly" for email than was ever expected to possible pre-internet. A lot of the specifics of Facebook weren't exactly on the radar as 1990s internet services, but suddenly for many people are required services with monopolistic lockdown.
There aren't easy answers here. We've passed beyond the 20th Century definitions of "utility". We probably need a new vocabulary for all of this. We probably need to collectively "sit down" and establish what all our new boundaries are, what powers we expect corporations to have over our lives, and which we expect to return to governments (as regulatory powers), and which we expect to collectively need to disrupt (through existing monopoly laws and trust busting exercises). Unfortunately no easy answers, just a lot of work to do that we'll probably collectively continue to procrastinate.
And remember, the maximum engagement one can possibly get is the open warfare. Facebook has been a tool of war propaganda, too, Zuckerberg is all for it if he can display some ads to the participants, last I've heard.
After the frontier era came the company towns and the large independent communities... Then, eventually, government incorporation and legal control.
I’m using COVID as an excuse to move away and start drawing down my involvement with all of it. I spent years trying to work my way into one of the few tech companies I considered at least nominally not trying to ruin the world for money but that’s not even enough.
We have built a dystopia, and short of finding a way to dismantle it that still lets me pay the rent and eat and not resign myself to a cat food retirement, I just want to get as far away from it as possible.
If you're set on getting out of the SV bubble, look around for needs in regenerative agriculture, or even carbon offset projects that need real estate to operate. If I had a different family situation, that's what I would be doing.
You’re free to label that histrionics, but I’m the one who has to face myself in the mirror.
For me it wasn’t just tech though; its all of corporate America. I just can’t take the lack of humanity, empathy, kindness. Nor can I take the useless work, endless, pointless posturing, forced “fun” activities, and the general dishonesty.
I weep for what we’ve done and the awful future that awaits. All this is probably histrionic too. But like you, I’d rather be able to look myself in the mirror, and get a good nights sleep.
Your landlord is a "private entity" but you're still a human being.
Even worse, when it comes to real estate, the government has no problem interfering in the livelihoods of landlords (often small operations), but completely absconds its responsibility on the internet dealing with giant billion-dollar corporations.
Some analogue to eviction rights is a fantastic idea. But the political winds are trending sharply in the other direction, pushing more responsibility onto services for aggressive enforcement of what people say or do on their platforms.
In an ideal world, the guilty would be rapidly and firmly dealt with while the innocent would be protected, but this is a million miles from the reality of how enforcement at scale works. It's a game of false positives vs false negatives, and we've recently been steering hard in the direction of diminishing user protections.
If I hadn't paid attention for the last ten years, it'd be astonishing that begging for corporate overlords to be more heavy-handed was coming from the _left_, of all places.
It is not coming from the left. Liberals, left and right leaning, are demanding corporations take responsibility but the _left_ are not liberals (in fact, go to any leftist message board and ask them what they think of liberals.)
More empirically (though anecdotally), I happen to have a decent amount of exposure to honest-to-god self-identified Communists and left-anarchists, the type of people who talk about praxis and casually mention revolution, including a good handful in my social circles (though none that i'm extra-close with).
While they're dismissive of the prissier, more superficial forms of identity politics that many moderate leftists enjoy performing, they're often openly dismissive of liberal values. While their preference is for regulation, they're fully in support of forcing platforms to more heavily engage in banning and censorship of undesirables (or as you and they put it, "take responsibility" for making the platform "safe"), presumably as a strategic move.
Thanks!
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/digital-se...
Twitter was forced to do it, almost on the verge of getting banned. So was Facebook and WhatsApp.
The "Compliance Officer" job is for the Indian government to have a neck to squeeze if that social media company allows some content on their site which doesn't toe the official line from the Indian government.
"The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet."
It's an edge case (one small country), but in New Zealand you currently can't exist *in public* without either iOS or Android. They've universally deployed a covid-related tracking app, which has been made mandatory this week, and only supports those two platforms.
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2021/08/coronavir...
https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...
This sounds too insane and stupid to be true. Because it isn't. From your second link:
> If you can’t use the app, download the NZ COVID Tracer booklet, keep a calendar or diary or take photos so you can recall where you’ve been.
Moreover, it looks like this is more about getting businesses etc to get people to log their visits. Like masked mandates in the United States, I would guess that this isn't about making sure that individuals who don't comply are dragged away by the cops.
Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too.
At any rate, the root cause is that Gmail, the world's largest webmail service, is affiliated with the world's largest search engine and the world's largest repository of video. Never mind this essay about social media, the connection between these three services is a ridiculous, dangerous thing.
But if your email address is “[email protected]”, you’re kind of screwed.
…and chuckling ruefully as I recall walking recent college grads who are far better devs than I am through what needed to happen for SendGrid to actually work for one of their project, having to start with “what is an MX record?” and “where is that controlled?”
Governments all over the world use email nowadays for all kinds of their own services, but which country offers free email to all their citizens? What about social networking or search? State broadcasters have existed for decades, yet nothing exists as fallback from big tech.
State broadcasters are a good point, but we tend to claim they aren't really "by the state" but "by the public", and thus independent from the state. Countries that don't do that (e.g. Russia, China) have invested heavily to have their local versions of Google, Facebook & friends.
Ironically, this is one of those places where in the US, government intervention could help... Not with regulation, but with service provision. A ".citizen.us" account provided through a federal bureau could be constrained legally in ways that a private email account currently cannot and serve as an authorization provider for citizens who don't want to entrust their digital identity to a megacorporation.
Or worse, what happens if you do that, but then your domain registrar or ISP decides to cancel you? Or Gmail decides to block messages to or from your server?
Or, on a lighter side: "Our systems have detected that you address to your partners-in-fun inappropriately".
Every financial or governmental institution is going to have some kind of failsafe for verifying you if you lose access to an email address.
If you’re worried about being put into a position that you’ll never have what you need to recover from a loss of an email address, then the onus is on you to make sure that doesn’t happen.
I know you had a larger argument you were articulating, but it was undermined by your example.
The actual consequence of the scenario you describe would be logging in to each service and changing the email address associated with it. But the idea that you'd be locked out, especially from your money, is just not realistic.
Steam also has the same system.
(Though I gather that there have started to be exceptions, as with dating apps. If this becomes more widespread, I'd agree with your concern)
I would go further and say good luck self-hosting your email at all if you're a Joe Schmoe.
Being able to do that can't be expected of everyone, so for the individual (especially the individual reading hackernews) it might be a way around the problem - but it's not a solution.
In the other HN thread about self-hosted email I've heard it essentially amounts to paying for racket protection so the big players don't "oops we accidentally blacklisted you, good luck trying to rectify that" you.
But expecting non-technical people to do it would be a nightmare, that I agree with.
I practise the same with email (and other coords): make sure changing them is easy, and do it occasionally to test if you've thought it through. Compartmentalize by having a number of adresses. You'll learn how to combine being lazy with being resilient, instead of just lazy and complacent. One email address at a company which you cannot hold accountable should not and in fact is not your identity. Prove to yourself it isn't and in that process learn how to deal with moving your identity (since that is how email is used nowadays).
I have a personal domain name that I host email through Protonmail. It is super easy to set up and I do not have any delivery issues.
Until Protonmail kicks you off for some vaguely specified reason.
At least that’s what I tell myself to avoid doing the work of changing email hosts for my family’s domain.
I self-host my email on a VPS and have been doing so for many many years. But for a startup that I am a part of, I said we buy mail hosting from Proton mail and so we did.
Probably eventually I will also begin hosting my personal mail with Proton mail because honestly the intermittent deliverability problems that I’ve been having through all these years with my self-hosted mail are a bit of an annoyance. Mostly it happens that I am marked as spam when mailing someone that has never sent mail to me yet. But I don’t send much email with that address anyways, mostly just receive, and rarely to new people, so it hasn’t been a priority.
For a while I was thinking of starting a paid email service of my own, but I just don’t think it’ll be worth the time to try and get into that market. But the idea was that if I was making money from it then I could spend the time to run such a service for many people and have employees to help me run it.
In the case of the Google login you're actually right. Once you get booted off it you'll have a problem. But this doesn't hold for all private firms. If you get kicked off Twitter you're just kicked off Twitter, it doesn't impact your ability to make payments or go about your day. Same for TikTok, whatever else have you.
There's a particular class of applications, identity and payment providers namely for which you can make a good case that they're infrastructure of sorts, but it doesn't really extend to the majority of digital services.
Though it seems the authentication process is not robustly secure anyway: a username & password combined with a personal question if it hasn't detected a login from your machine recently.
Huh? I've never seen that happen. Banks have you set up a username.
This is pretty disingenuous. Most of these arguments are about whether or not you can have a Twitter account, tying it to you losing a gmail account is to twist other people’s arguments around.
Email is much closer to a phone than say, Twitter or FB. Losing the ability to post on Twitter is annoying, but losing your email can have devastating consequences that OP delineated.
Any time that we discuss whether or not the government should step in and curtail the actions of a private party, we are explicitly or implicitly balancing the harm of government interference against the harm that such a private action might cause.
Looks like you just spotted a right list of "trigger keywords" and launched a counterattack.
Nowhere, but I wasn’t actually saying that you were talking about Twitter. Rather I’m saying that you’re taking an argument usually relevant to social media companies like Twitter, and using them in a new context in a way that’s closer to a straw man than anything else.
> Looks like you just spotted a right list of "trigger keywords" and launched a counterattack.
No, I saw an argument I normally make being represented in an unfair way, and wanted to express my disagreement. Your use of the pejorative “hive mind” did not help my perception. Nor, frankly, has this response.
Every single example you name happens just the same under regulation / government bureaucracy. Replacing private services with government services or tight regulation of industry doesn't improve error rate nor incentives. Consider the three key differences:
1) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, it is legally and culturally considered your own fault - "you filled the form badly" or any other such. The error rate gets worse, if anything.
2) When the regulators / the bureaucracy causes you trouble, the media has little incentive to hound them persistently. Private companies buy advertising, and the media can push them until they do; conversely the government doesn't buy advertising, but instead can launch endless "lawfare" against journalists, thus making it rather unprofitable to hound them over - what legally and culturally is "your own fault" anyway. That's mis-aligned incentives.
3) There's no competing government to come to, unless you're willing to uproot your whole family and move abroad. And in particularly egregious cases even that is either illegal or made difficult and lengthy - hey, we're having a pandemic right now.
That we know and obsess over the mistakes and problems caused by private service providers is prim and proper - as it is thanks to the interest of journalists and aligned incentives. The same would largely pass unnoticed and at larger scale, under regulation / bureaucracy. So let's not go backwards, shall we?
The third option, un-coordinated / de-centralized services are technically feasible, but quite hard to successfully build for organizational & financial reasons. Presumably we will get there eventually.
A private company like Google can kill your Gmail like that, and that's it, they don't even owe you a reason. It's their "right" to do whatever.
Government and regulated institutions have endless ways of denying service - whether by finding procedural errors or by stalling. Iron property of bureaucracy. For example: KYC and AML laws hurt small businesses at random, including countless PayPal drama stories.
Again the difference is in culture and in reporting: account "suspended" is often reported and perceived as unjust and raise understandable outrage (the egregious cases aside), while legal proceedings are usually reported and perceived as just and proper.
My point is, if we were to change the private platforms to strict regulation or outright government provided services, almost all suspensions would be reported and perceived as the user's own fault, and probably for the better of the society. Which puts the incentives of such supposed service-provider completely out of whack.
Case in point: a government-provided account would be suspended "for the duration of investigation into spreading misleading information about health/elections/finances/etc.", and reporters and people would largely shrug it off as "well that's for the better". Oh and trying to open an account with another government would raise all sorts of red flags, naturally.
For all the warts of private services, there's alternatives available, and the journalists & public opinion don't side with them by default - but rather with the user.
What you described above, about doing paperwork, has one trait: those government institutions live by the book and die by the book. A frustrated official may act against you as long as regulations permit him, but you can use just the same regulations against him right back. I mean if you live in a democracy, even a shitty one.
There are, though, no restraints whatsoever on what a private company may do, and entrusting them with that much of one's life is foolish. Because you don't even get to see the rulebook, like, ever. Employees reading your private messages daily? Well boo hoo, cry me a river, and it's probably in one of those ToS amendmends you agree to or else get booted out.
So, you have an email address at Gmail which you're using to authenticate everywhere, which is your username at most services, and possibly your main point of contact.
Then you mention something innocuous, I don't know, a cucumber maybe, on YouTube in a comment, and now your account is gone because apparently cucumbers are a part of some neo-nazi slang or a secret pedophile ring slang, and you got reported into oblivion.
Since your email address was also a part of getting into your bank account, now you've got a problem of getting your money, too.
The hoops you have now to jump are worse than changing spelling of your legal name or changing the fucking citizenship.
Still, the internet hivemind is raving that "it's not censorship if a private company is doing it", "they are a private company so they have a right to boot anyone off".
Of course another cohort of smug internet users will say: just self-host your email! Well, good luck getting your email deliverable if you're a Joe Schmoe and not one of the big players in the first place.
The big companies pulled the blanket so much that without using their services, you may as well not exist on the internet. They've made it extremely difficult, at least. They got, in some sense, bigger than many individual governments in regulating information channels. And yet they dodge all responsibility on the premise of being "private companies".
What a wonderful world to be living in.