Ask HN: Should we own the free stuff we pay for?

Alas, email forwarding is fairly broken since DKIM/DMARC/SPF/SRS came into the picture.

As for not allowing people to save their data before shutting down, I agreee. That's a consumer rights issue though, and not a technical one.

I do see this overall situation being at least partially consequence of the early internet community thinking that internet could live outside any traditional structures and especially laws. There was this strong sense that we could forge a new ultra-liberal virtual world, free of the shackles of the physical world. In retrospect that way of thinking now feels pretty naive. That led to outright hostility towards any ideas of government-rooted electronic identity programs, or anything resembling that.

The reason I think government identities are significant here is two-fold. Firstly it left an vacuum for identities that email, despite its obvious shortcomings, then filled. Secondly, weak unconnected identities provide poor means of dealing with abuse.

Sibling threads discuss how kicking people out of e.g. banking or rental involves some legal processes or something comparable. But in those cases both the barrier of abuse is higher because usually there are real consequences, and doing whatever legal process is more practical because the other party is not just some John Doe. In contrast the scale of abuse something like Gmail faces is pretty staggering, and the ability for the operator (Google) to do anything about it is somewhat limited, so it is somewhat understandable how they ended up so trigger happy with bans.

I posit that if we were able to implement real consequences to the actual abusers, then we well-behaved users could have stronger standing to demand better treatment for ourselves and we would be less likely to face the current level of opaque algorithmic bans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technolibertarianism

How did you get your Gmail account back?

> But I lost access to paid services that I had set up with social login, besides all Google's services ( GCP, firebase, youtube premium, google one, subscriptions paid through play store, google ads, etc, etc).

So you gave Google total control over your entire online presence, tying a bunch of things you depend on into a tight bundle that would all get banned at once. And, by including so many things, you created more opportunities for something you did with one of them to trigger a ban of all of them.

> The google stack is very convenient,

... except when you get totally shut down for no reason. Which is an absolutely predictable consequence.

You have a very strange idea of convenience.

> and it's 2022, I'm not going to start hosting my email server,

This reads to me as "I'm unwilling to take even the most trivial steps to solve the problem".

> But what if I get reported on my domain name? What if that gets suspended or blacklisted too?

That is a risk, but, at least as of today, it's much, much harder to get a domain name shut down than to get something like a Google account shut down.

Nonetheless, you should probably be isolating things that are really important to you under separate domain names unless they NEED to be tied together.

> Do we own our phone numbers, emails, handles, PO boxes, addresses?

The user agreements for most of those will say no. The standard on the Internet right now is "We can cut you off for any reason whatsoever and you have no recourse". It's right there in black and white. And it's been that way forever. Maybe it's wrong. Maybe there should be legal changes. Maybe there should at least be changes in common expectations. But at the moment, that is how it works.

So don't become overdependent on any of them, and don't set up a situation where losing one also loses others. This is pretty basic stuff.

Google doesn't get social engineered into handing over user accounts since maybe a few hundred people have any access to the Google Accounts system proper, less so for the gmail.com organization (Workspace Support can help with recovering an Admin account in an org). Introducing a way to retrieve an account via human intervention makes the chance of someone taking over a Google account via malicious social engineering, incl. faking national ID cards, non-zero. In fact, i'm sure tons of people have been able to take over accounts using account recovery[0] where it'll ask you things like "when did you create this account" and "what was the phone number you put on the account".

0: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/7299973