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These companies want to become as ubiquitous as a public utility. Therefore they should be regulated like a public utility
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
but surely you can show up at your bank with identification and get the email changed?
Depends how close your closest physical branch is. It may be hours away because of where you live. Or it may be a flight away because you're abroad.
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I agree. Companies like Microsoft never do this to ordinary people.
In the recent months and with the increasing possibilities of surveillance with AI and how they are controlling the narrative of things, it made me feel incredibly uneasy. No more of these products on my devices.
These companies want to become as ubiquitous as a public utility. Therefore they should be regulated like a public utility
For example a major chain convenience store with few similar competitors could ban someone for shoplifting, but someone innocent caught by this should be able to sue and win if the store cannot convince a court that such an event actually occurred. A mom-and-pop store wouldn't be within scope of this.
And the same for online businesses.
This is why I have my own domain and control the MX records on the DNS on it, so that I can reroute email to a new email provider, if needed (I pay for Fastmail). Another nice thing about having a catch-all on own domain is that you can sign up to each service with a unique email address, e.g. @ , which makes it easy to see if any services ever sold your address.
Let’s note however that even "owning a domain" is an illusion of control, as IANA is ultimately a retainer of uncle Sam. I don’t know if there is any functional distributed alternative that promote more autonomy to end users that can works out of the box (or even just a few basic install steps away) in most digital terminal out there.