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Something like Gmail should exist..Something like Gmail... I'm not sure if you mean by this; a multi-billion dollar tech stack built by the leading internet company in the world, securing exabytes of data for its customers with redundant backup, provided in hundreds of countries (and languages?), hosted across dozens of data centers, offering easy access through native apps on every dominant platform, with 5-nine availability,...
> [E]veryone should have free access to a basic web based email service.
There are two issues here, first is internet access and second is services available via the internet.
I think it is a great ideal to state that everyone in the world should have the ability access to the Internet in some form, with the ability to benefit from the online learning and communications tools it provides. Governments should use tools like spectrum licensing, and eminent domain to promote fair and equitable infrastructure deployments which provide reliable high speed access at reasonable prices to their entire population.
I disagree that government should outright purchase internet access for its citizens. The market for internet access is fairly anti-competitive already, government subsidies for specific levels of access work out poorly in practice, and tend to provide substandard service at above-market prices. This means the taxpayer loses and the citizen getting subsidized access loses. It works out better in theory and in practice to ensure your population has good paying jobs and can decide how they want to spend that money, including, whether they spend it on phones or laptops with LTE or wired internet access, which service provider they use, etc.
As to "free access to a basic web based email service" -- and to be sure, there's nothing "basic" about Gmail at all -- the amazing thing is that there are already a plethora of choices that netizens can make when setting up an email account, and many good free choices. Each of these free choices are usually subsidized either by paying customers of a premium offering, advertisements services with the email, or other services that the company offers.
What's great about this model is that companies are competing to provide the best possible email interface, at the lowest possible infrastructure costs to them, and attempting to offer such a great experience that they can ultimately convert those users into more frequent [paying] customers.
Practically everything about this model breaks down when you try to have "the government" provide the service.
> Gmail and other private services have been allowed to take the place of something the government should provide so someone can make money off it it, and it's open to abuse and inequity. Some services are important enough that not having them makes you a second class person.
Gmail and other private services paved the way by spending their hard-earned R&D dollars to innovate and invent new delivery models for these services. To be sure, this was a public/private partnership at the most foundational level (ARPANET) and it has grown to be perhaps the crowning example of what private industry properly supported by government research and hands-off regulatory approach can achieve.
> Imagine how you'd feel if the US post office told you that you couldn't receive mail any more because you had an unpaid parking ticket in another city?
That unpaid parking ticket will mean, in many jurisdictions, that you cannot renew your registration or your license, which means the day will come when you cannot legally drive. That's the thing with State control of critical services; the day always comes when they will use a big stick to make you comply with their demands, or they will take those services away.
Private communication infrastructure must never be directly provided by the government, most especially. I'm sure you've heard of PRISM, or how a secret court allowed the government to vacuum up call meta-data for basically everyone in the United States for a period of time. Maybe you've heard of "reverse warrants" where the government pulls geo-location data from phones of everyone in an area that a crime was committed to create a list of suspects. Just this week the Courts rules [again] that government has trampled on the Constitution in wide-spread data collection.
Do you suspect that government provided email services will be instituted with the best-in-class end-to-end encryption algorithms? Do you suspect those troves of emails in a government server will be protected by government employees from overly broad subpoenas? Do you suspect the government will hire the best & brightest engineers to constantly push the envelope of how those services are delivered and the features they provide? Do you suspect government servers will consistently run on reliable, cost efficient infrastructure?
> Private companies are not, and private companies should not be allowed to provide critical services without regulation to ensure equal treatment for everyone and a means to contest the actions of the company for every user.
Who gets to define "critical services"? Email didn't even exist as such a widespread part of our lives until private enterprise invested the hundreds of billions of dollars getting us to this point. Now that the ecosystem is established, you think the government should step in and strictly regulate it because a private company offering a private service terminated the account of one of its billions of users.
What else do you suppose is a "critical service" beyond email? Should we include cell phones? What about the news? Email seems such an arbitrary choice, but it is a great example to illustrate the dangers of this approach.
To switch back to TFA - and Google canceling this pour soul's account... What we don't hear about are the millions of accounts which Google terminates due to actual "valid" ToS violations. What we have is anecdotes, but what don't know are the true and false positive rates, or even the true/false negative rates of their abuse detection systems.
I believe Google needs to do a lot better with dispute resolution when an account is flagged for termination. This is true across their properties -- Gmail, AdWords, Store, etc. But I don't have the context & data I would need to pass judgement on the anecdotal failures I hear about semi-regularly.
I'm glad for the services that Google has created, because they push the whole industry forward in many ways, and they also provide incredible value for both users and Google alike. The ecosystem Google has created is an extremely impressive technological achievement, and the scale that they operate on is boggling.
The past is littered with failed examples of governments taking over and then failing to innovate or maintain an industry, whereas the examples of when government works side-by-side with private enterprise to create opportunities where the incentives did not align to allow a fully private solution are equally numerous. Government works best when it builds the roads to allow private industry to innovate upon, but doesn't try to build the figurative cars and trucks too.