Email is our only reliable communication method between different organizations.
I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.
I'm still of the opinion there should be public-option internet services. Everyone deserves an e-mail address that cannot be taken away from them without a court order.
Not even a court order, arguably. Internet access and it's essential services like email, is arguably a human right in developed countries. Almost impossible to find employment without it.
ISPs can’t take your domain and blocking is quite rare - usually just active malware attacks - but that seems like an argument for regulating them as utilities because they’re a natural chokepoint and as such many people do not have the option of switching.
And yet, it can be taken from you with a court order.
Like for phone numbers (at least here you can migrate the whole number, even with ndc)
The state could give out an emailadress like a social security number and you just use that as an alias and can choose whatever provider you want.
And for these emailadresses the providers would be obliged to take you. (Like for mandatory insurances. We have them where I live)
Also it's kind of technical. Perfect for a nerd like me, but e.g. for my mum? Nope!
It is a bit technical, but that can be solved without involving the government. You just need the registrar and email providers to talk to each other with OAuth plus some DNS delegation protocol.
btw, Germany did this a decade ago: giving everyone an email account with the national mail service, as an "official email." I honestly don't know anyone here who uses it.
How common is this if you’ve setup DKIM, SPF, etc.? I’ve only heard about problems in that context where someone hadn’t done the basics or was trying to send from shared IPs and hit some spammer’s past reputation.
There are many decisions that impact the usability and cost of the service. Some people need high volume sending or large mailbox storage. Do you punish people for sending spam? Do you filter spam, if so, how. Do people need public terminals to access the service? Etc.
Do you punish people for sending spam?
Only by making them pay for every mail they send.
Do you filter spam, if so, how.
On the receiving end. A plugin system would let people choose to subscribe to updated blocklists and filtering rules, just like modern adblocking.
Do people need public terminals to access the service?
Same way it is now. The vast majority of people have their own smart devices, and for the ones who don't there's the public library.
When you write “charge” do you mean money? When you say “at cost” do you mean at the cost of the sender, receiver, both?
If charge means money, isn’t money just a transaction cost inefficient method of proving stake? Maybe a new SMTP would ask the sending server to perform some work on behalf of the reciever in order for the recover to accept it.
I still would expect this breaks down from ASICS and generally the price not being high enough.
Maybe this would work better in combination with PKI: allow me to give you a signed voucher OR you pay full price, allowing that price to be set high enough to actually deter spam. That wouldn’t help with businesses abusing your contact info for marketing, of course, but there’s never going to be one fix for this class of problems.
For many people, email is synonymous with free digital communication. Ideally such an essential service should not discriminate against homeless people or people with disabilities.
Especially since in your scenario compromised credentials could incur financial losses
Why would you be liable for that? An equivalent of the FDIC would work fine.
SSN-xx-HERE@citizen.gov is a how, which may or may not be a good one. For one, here in France, the SSN isn't as important as it seems to be in the US, so its being public is probably less of an issue. This approach would still be bad for spam or whatever.
Another how could be by using the same kind of naming in use elsewhere, as in name.surname.213@citizen.gov. Except that not anyone would be able to randomly open an account. You'd have to go through some kind of agency that would check your ID. This would allow them to expose a way of changing (in case its overrun by spam) or unlocking (in case of lost password) your account safely.
We have a more or less similar thing in France with bank accounts: you have an "opposable right" (as in, undeniable) to have a basic bank account. Not sure if this is a French law or an EU directive, but I think the same could work for email.
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Avoiding the SSN issue, I think this still comes down to either forcing 3rd parties to host email accounts or gov hosting said email accounts. The former leads to "free" but not free email (like TurboTax) with the former or an outright loss in privacy with the latter.
There's of course the price issue, but that's the case in both situations (3rd party and gov hosting). Of course, at least in France, the government isn't known for always making the best choices cost-wise...
In fact, I can't think of a single market dominated by a handful of large companies hasnt been improved by the introduction of a government competitor.
There's a reason telcos lobby hard against community broadband and that financial institutions dial back the usuriousness of their fees when the post office offers bare bones accounts.
You are just lucky with your number. We get an average of 10 calls a day. Yes, in France. Stuff like Bloctel do not work, it isn't respected. I don't even know if fake caller numbers are now finally disallowed, it doesn't look so; anyway they were allowed for a long time.
Each time the government grants subsidies for whatever, it is immediately diverted by an enormous amount of companies which deal with the grey areas of the laws (laws concerning that subsidies and laws concerning solicitations), and if you have a residential number, you get spammed with commercial robot calls all the time (and then there are the 'empty' robot calls, too).
In France at least, many people (mostly the elderly) are having a hard time using computers and such. Some Government agencies have dedicated personnel to help them with filling in the forms and such on dedicated computers. It could probably be easier for them if they also provided email instead of relying on a third party provider. Grandma lost her password? No biggie. If she has her ID, we can reset it for her. Good luck getting any kind of support from Google / Yahoo in such a case.
Of course, I will explicitly say that I would be very much against such a service being compulsory for the people. I just think it should exist.
There is also the issue of data stewardship, (democratic) governments can ensure independent reviews and be held accountable for security breaches and data misuse. They could also be held liable for losses incurred by service defects.
Why?
* applying for jobs
* getting covid tests/vaccines
* buying virtually anything online
* interacting with the government online (I needed to provide an email address to update my driver's license and vehicle registration)
* opening a bank account
* renting an apartment
These are important things, so we might as well have some guaranteed way to access these services. Especially because you need an email to interact with a lot of government services.
I don't think the change we need to make here is "everyone should require email for everything, and therefore we need government subsidized emails for everyone." If anything, the change should be "email is not required", because it's not.
Furthermore, these are not rights but privileges:
> buying virtually anything online > interacting with the government online (I needed to provide an email address to update my driver's license and vehicle registration) > opening a bank account > renting an apartment
I feel strongly the other things aren't rights either, but don't want to argue about it.
You are welcome to try to make a point again without twisting my words if you'd like, if you can.
Taking away an email address someone has had and is their primary point of contact for years, possibly decades is irreplaceable. Being able to create a new one isn't equal to the old one.
Not sure about elsewhere in the world, but even regular mail isn't that painful in my country. Pay a nominal fee to Australia post and you can have all mail addressed to you forwarded from your old to new address for N months (or years).
I noticed that Yahoo now charges to forward email from my old address, which I think is unreasonable.
... why? What are you basing this on legally/morally other than your own want?
[1] - https://history.house.gov/Records-and-Research/Listing/lfp_0...
Did they serve the public interest (as in, did everybody benefit from them) when they were starting to get built?
That's precisely what will happen with what I proposed.
It had all sorts of nice properties, including some resilience against Sybil attacks.
The problem was that, even with the ability to "forget" unneeded blocks, the storage requirement was simply out of reach for the regular person. [2]
And because it's out of reach of the regular person, it will inevitably centralize around companies that do it for people. And we're back to where we started.
So that's why I gave up on the idea.
[1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2020/07/decentralizing-the-internet-...
[2]: https://gavinhoward.com/2021/03/setting-aside-an-idea-decent...
There are a lot of problems for which you can create solutions that involve web3 and blockchain but that doesn't mean that technology is necessary nor sufficient to solve those problems, nor that it is the best solution (or a good solution, at least).
Web3 and blockchain do solve a number of problems in the specific scenario that you want to collaborate within domains controlled by the blockchain with individuals you actively distrust, though. With the obvious caveats that you have to trust the blockchain itself (which both in PoS and PoW means trusting people with sufficient wealth to control large portions of the infrastructure) and that everything you want to do has to be within domains controlled by the blockchain (whether the actual problems within that domain benefit from this or not).
So in a sense the question becomes how much you are willing to sacrifice to be able to solve that class of problems instead of redefining the problem so it doesn't require a blockchain.