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Comment by noman-land | Hacker News Reader

What if Google took your 16 year old email address? Corporate cloud is an absolute trap. A prison. You cannot trust these companies with your important digital belongings.

Free, libre, open source software, peer to peer networks, and citizen run communications infrastructure are the only viable way forward if we don't to live in a rental society where none of your belongings belong to you, not even your identity.

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I am assuming they will take my 19 yo email address. So I am moving my logins slowly to my own domain.

“my own domain”

Which is a touch more solid (I use in in that way) but still an ephemeral rented thing, not owned.

What is a better alternative? Is there one?

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Ultimately, you're going to depend on other parties behaving in a common interest, whether that's your email provider, your ISP, your registrar, anyone accepting your ip address announcements...

And then you have an endless stream of spam, people knocking on ports, etc. Better to keep things airgapped. All one really needs in life is a cyberdeck utility running on freertos in an MCU. Then you are truly captain of your own ship and own your world of compute.

You can probably sue if the registar just gives it to someone else. Which is as good as owning anything is gonna get.

Not if the country is taken over by a military coup and they recapture all the domains, e.g. Mali.

It's not your email address unless the part after the @ belongs to you.

It's not _your_ domain unless the registrar belongs to you...

It's not your registrar unless the DNS infrastructure belongs to you.

It's not your DNS infrastructure unless ...?

Unless you use or create an alternative root:

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

So only way is to find my own nation state... And get it recognized. As then I can have my on ccTLD. And then only slight issue is staying in power for rest of my life...

You still have to worry about despots in other nation states using their armies to come for Your things.

>What if Google took your 16 year old email address?

They can take my email address, I'm keeping my emails.

Got a mail client running on several machines for that reason. All hail IMAP.

Notifying all the people I've ever sent an email to of a new address is a quick task with an offline email client.

Changing the email address on all the accounts is a bit of a chore, but that goes with (as you rightfully say) not owning that email address.

Guess one of these days I'll run a mail server just for creating online accounts. It won't even need to send anything, so no worrying about aggressive spam filters. And it can auto-delete everything each day too without harm.

What about ARIN and IANA? Eventually there is some central authority associated with the internet, IP address blocks and DNS root servers.

That’s why we normally have faith in the rule of law, so that big players cannot just rip the livelihood out of smaller ones.

Not in my threat model. But yes at some point you could get offlined completely or your internet heavily sensored if you live in a country that does that

This is why I was very careful to include "citizen run communications infrastructure". We need public antennas, public access points. Publicly run physical infrastructure.

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