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Comment by dilyevsky | Hacker News Reader

how is the user being held hostage? you can redirect hide my email addresses to any domain

Marketing turds can't just block registrations from all of @icloud.com.

That doesn’t explain how the user is held “hostage” by Apple

Hostage may be a bad analogy. More like a game of chicken. Imagine you are a regular @icloud.com email user. Apple is basically saying "I dare you to block all @icloud.com email and lose all these customers"

you could say the same thing about AWS or Cloudflare hosting anybody and everybody. Spain actually started blocking a bunch of their IP blocks during football matches due to a poorly thought out legal decision.

So the website is being "held hostage", not the user.

The user is held hostage as much as the platforms because it's used as "currency" to force other sites to do things they may not want to, i.e. create accounts using private emails, and the platforms are held hostage by these same users expecting to be able to create accounts using their legit or private icloud emails. It looks like some kind of "who will break first", is there a service big enough to be able to block all icloud emails and it'd be a sufficient inconvenience to force apple to rethink how private email works ?

Can they block registrations from @private.icloud.com?

Yes, they would have been able to if the proposal had gone ahead.

I think the other answers are misinterpreting your question. A user is held "hostage" because unlike fastmail where the format is word.salad@yourdomain; if you ever wanted to ditch iCloud completely, you'd have to go through every single account you used it for and update the email. As someone who has shed his gmail account I can tell you it's not easy to update email address on every site you've ever used it on. The issue people are raising is that apple doesn't let you use your own domain, and generate random emails at that domain. Not my complaint, but I can see the perspective.

I mean, that is no different than any other provider.

If you want to degoogle, you still have to go to each site and change your staticuser@gmail.com individually.

Most users already do not use custom domains if that's the catch.

Yes you can do word.salad@yourdomain with fastmail but that ius no different to other mail providers.

What the above comments re fastmail is about their masked email service this gives addresses like <random>@fastmail.com so this is the same lockin as Apple with the same benefits of noone is going to block that domain.

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