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

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

#201

Post by gbasin »

Grustaf wrote: post #30

When you put it this way, it's really quite remarkable how tenuous our hold is on even paid for digital services. There is really nothing you could do with a car to prompt the car maker to take it from you. And the state will only take it if you break the law in particularly dangerous ways. When it comes to other possessions it's even harder for anyone to take them away from you. If I take a kitchen knife and stab so…

Not to be That Guy, since I'm not a shill, but "Bitcoin solves this" — not really today, except for pure cryptocurrency, but I can imagine a future where ownership of our access to these services is controlled by public blockchains ...

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

#202

Post by TameAntelope »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #18

Apologies for going meta here: Could I urge that posters follow the site convention of prefixing the title with with Ask HN, Tell HN, etc. for posts that don't link to an external source? There are currently two such posts in the top 30. HN is primarily for discussing external articles, and I'd suggest that this post should have been submitted as such.

Hm, I’m not sure where you got the idea that HN was primarily about discussing articles, because that is in no way true.

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

#203

Post by chrisweekly »

utucuro wrote: post #113
pydry wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like improvmx but, like $3-4 a month instead of $9 with just bare bones POP3 and SMTP for personal use only would suit me. I'd like to self host data and webmail and pay somebody else manage the headache of delivering and receiving.

Fastmail handles the whole thing admirably as far as I'm concerned. Get your custom domain, create a mail user with Fastmail: username@mydomain.com Set things up nicely (do read the docs), particularly look at catchalls, wildcards and aliases Give out separate email addresses to each and every service you use: service@username.mydomain.com Bonus: You can easily send emails back from each address you give out and if y…

+1 for Fastmail "just works". It's a bargain, has great UX, and all the features I could think of.

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

#204

Post by joshOiknine »

You make a good point. Your address is yours because you own/rent said property and the address is associated to that. Your phone number also can be yours because you have the ability to transfer it from one service provides to the next. Email should be the same but the problem with email is that it is tied to a domain. Has anyone thought of a way to decouple emails from the TLD?

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

#205

Post by 3pt14159 »

mminer237 wrote: post #192

You can't compel a company to provide you with a service. That's a little too close to slavery for society's taste. If a company doesn't provide you with a service you agreed to, you can get damages from a court, but you have to use such services as your contract agreed. It stinks to end up on the wrong end, but that's part of the cost of getting such massive benefits for free. If you want something more reliable or…

> You can't compel a company to provide you with a service.

Yes we can. We have for centuries. These entities exist as the result of the will of the people. We are the ones that allowed the concept of corporate personhood to come into being.

Rights are important, yes, but this isn't really about rights and everyone knows it. This is about Google optimizing their support staff to maximize their own ends over what would be jointly better for everyone. An email account is more important than a real address these days, and it is perfectly reasonable for us to expect that, at the very least, Google forward mail to a new account after closing it and quite frankly they should do much more than that, especially if someone is willing to pay for support time.

If Google locked me out of my accounts it would cost me around 200 or 300 hours of work. I would literally pay $25k to reverse their stupid decision over the alternative. What I'm trying to say here is that the costs of type 1 error here is completely born out on the public, and one of the roles for Government is to solve these tragedy of the commons situations.

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

#206

Post by samtho »

Hizonner wrote: post #197

> 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 mo…

There is a lot of victim blaming here. If Google wishes to continue to provide an email service, it should be a reasonable expectation that you don’t get your account disabled due to some automated false positive or at least have a real appeal process to reenable it. Because the opposite is true, it’s a bigger systemic problem that should be addressed one way or another.

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

#207

Post by pjc50 »

Grustaf wrote: post #53
pjc50 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> even something as crucial as a banking service Interestingly the problem of people excluded from the banking system has been addressed by statutory regulation in the UK: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/basic-bank-account... ; see also discussion at https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201617/ldselect/ldfi... which covers the question of people with inadequate ID. Getting your email account wrongly bann…

Good to hear that you have protections around this in the UK. I know that in Sweden several political, and even ideological organisations have had their accounts frozen because of things they said or held true. Entirely legal things I should add.

The rules only apply to bank accounts, and there are still circumstances under which they can be frozen, but "bank just decides you can't have your money" is a lot rarer.

Edit: see Which? who are always good on consumer issues: https://www.which.co.uk/news/2021/09/why-banks-are-freezing-... : alleged suspicious activity; https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/oct/22/exclusive-h... inactivity

Traditional British solution: a QUANGO and an Ombudsman.

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

#208

Post by hvdijk »

thfuran wrote: post #91
hvdijk wrote: post #71

Are you overreacting? In my opinion, depending on how long the suspension lasts, you may be, though not necessarily. You sent unsolicited bulk e-mail. That is spam. It is possible that your mail helped some people, but anyone who had set up their own filtering to prevent the original mail from coming through would then only see it because of your followup, and additionally the "To" list may well have been spoofed as…

If their obligation is to stop the sending of spam, then why is it right that they also block all other uses of the account and all access to all linked accounts? How could it possibly be the case that that is the minimal restriction they could place to prevent sending emails? Surely they could just...not allow the sending of emails from an account.

Yeah, that's a good point. There is a chance it is simply not a possibility in the way their systems are currently set up, but if so, that's on Google and they should change their systems to make it possible.

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

#209

Post by stickfigure »

randunel wrote: post #45

Phone number porting is a thing due to regulation. I'm looking forward to having email address porting legislation, one day. For full porting, there's a long road ahead, starting with regulating domain names, which email addresses depend on. However, as long as the domain name _de facto_ remains in the possession of the original provider, this is technically possible, already. Email address porting might even be poss…

We have email porting already. With a custom domain, you can point it at any mail host you like. It costs a few bucks a year.

There's no reason for a complicated legal structure to ensure mail forwarding (which just begs for abuse). Users already have the power. Use it.

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

#210

Post by suhastech »

I got into the exact same problem a few years ago. So, I wrote email backup app: https://thehorcrux.com/why-i-built-horcrux-app/

I still use Google Apps at this point as it's pretty convenient compared to standing up my own server. However, I make sure my email address is on my own domain. https://thehorcrux.com/about/

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