FCC asked to mandate 'e-mail address portability'
The Federal Communications Commission is being asked to do a remarkably silly thing: create mandatory "e-mail address portability."
The idea is that because the U.S. Post Office offers to forward physical mail, and because FCC rules require telephone service providers to offer number portability, the same principle should be extended to e-mail accounts.
Here are some excerpts from the petition to the FCC asking for an immediate rulemaking:
In today's world, many individuals and businesses depend just as heavily on their e-mail addresses as on their phone numbers as public points of contact with the larger world. One's e-mail address is a key component of the small matrix of characteristics which forms our public identity: one's name, one's address, one's phone number, and one's e-mail address. This is how the world knows who we are and how to contact us. E-mail addresses are now customarily included on letterheads, resumes and Web sites. The loss of an e-mail address is therefore a crushing blow to any business since not only does all the collateral material have to be discarded, but all the good will that has been generated over the years with that address can be lost in a second if the address is terminated.
The solution to this problem is clear: require ISPs to port e-mail traffic to new e-mail addresses designated by customers. There is no technical reason at all why an e-mail sent to "customer@aol.com" could not be automatically forwarded by AOL to "customer'snewaddress@yahoo.com." This would require none of the technical re-tooling which LNP entailed and could be implemented almost immediately. This simple measure would provide the American public--both consumers and the business community--with the basic confidence that their personal or business identity cannot be destroyed at the whim of their ISP.
The petition was filed by Gail Mortenson, a freelance writer in Washington, D.C., who had a run-in with AOL customer service when she tried to stop paying monthly service charges (some AOL services like e-mail are now free). Mortenson says her AOL account was unceremoniously closed after she disclosed to AOL customer service that her son had been a minor when he opened it.
Now, I admit that AOL was being unreasonable, but that doesn't mean the FCC needs to get involved. So just why is Mortenson's proposal silly? Let me count the ways:
1. If you're running any kind of business, even a freelance writing business, it's naive to use an AOL, Hotmail or Yahoo e-mail address. This will be your online identity for the foreseeable future, and you don't know if those companies will be around (or if you'll like their e-mail clients or annual fees) a decade from now. Buy your own domain name for around $10 a year instead.
2. E-mail is not the telephone system. The way e-mail forwarding works is for the message to be received by address1@aol.com, which AOL's mail transport agent forwards to address2@yahoo.com. If the customer switches accounts a second time, the message would be forwarded from AOL to Yahoo and on again to address3@gmail.com. Any message to address1 would bounce through three different e-mail providers--a horrifically inefficient delivery route. It also introduces more ways for delivery to fail; if even one e-mail provider in the chain is having network difficulties, email to address1 won't get through.
3. E-mail is free. Let's keep it that way. By that I mean companies like Yahoo and Microsoft offer us no-cost e-mail services in exchange for sending us ads. If they're forced by FCC edict to be a free e-mail forwarding service and they can't make any money at it, they may be less likely to offer free e-mail (or generous mailbox sizes) in the first place.
4. Domain names are portable but e-mail addresses are not. Internet engineers refer to the "protocol stack," and a similar concept applies to policy matters too. If you own a domain name and don't like your registrar or hosting provider, you can take your business elsewhere in a highly competitive market. E-mail addresses are the wrong level of the policy stack to target.
5. The FCC probably does not have the authority to do this. If the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit wouldn't let the FCC get away with mandating the broadcast flag, why would it let the FCC get away with mandating the even more dubious requirement of e-mail portability?
6. E-mail portability already exists in some forms. Gmail offers e-mail forwarding. So does Pobox.com, for $20 a year. There's nothing stopping other services from using e-mail forwarding (perhaps for a year after a customer closes his account) to differentiate themselves from their rivals. Or from coming up with Internetwide standards if there's sufficient customer demand.
7. There's no market failure. Not only is pre-emptive regulation rarely wise, but it's extra double-plus unwise when there's no market failure, a term some economists use to describe when the free market is inefficient because of, say, imperfect competition. Buying your own domain name is a counterpoint to any alleged market failure. Besides, getting the FCC involved is much more likely to lead to what's known as a government failure.
I have no inside knowledge about whether the FCC will take Mortenson seriously enough to start a formal proceeding. But stranger things have happened in Washington, and sometimes shining a bright light on silly proposals is the best way to ensure they quietly expire in the dark.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
And would email verification techniques like SPF and Domain Keys still work? My first thought is they would not. A regulation like this would be a spammer's dream.
Let's hope the PTB in the FCC are wise enough to tell Ms. Mortenson no.
Plus, most of the email providers do this already. Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo all provide the ability to forward your email. Only the "pay for" services like AOL don't.
SPF and Domain keys validate the *sender* and have nothing to do with validating email that has been forwarded at your request. Presumably you'd only need to receive emails for a given account anyway.
meddling in the U.S. As a result we have the freest and cheapest
form of mass communication ever created. But start encouraging
politicians to get involved and the trickle will become a deluge.
Freedom and diversity will sink and costs will rise.
I am not a child and I don't need the government to handle my
email accounts for me.
of what happens when government -- in this case two
governments -- is in charge.
http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/10/04/domain/index.php?
lsrc=mwrss
Do you want these people to manage your email account for you?
To me, it seems like common sense. The FCC proposal to make e-mail addresses "portable" is stupid. The proposal would put an unreasonable, expensive, and unnecessary burden on ISPs.
My primary personal email address has been with Gmail for more than two years - and my ISP-provided email address automatically forwards to that one.
IMO, with all the other options out there now, the ISP-provided email address is on the road to becoming obsolete. It wouldn't surprise me five or 10 years from now if ISPs stop providing email as a standard feature of their internet connectivity services.
email is a noteworthy problem? If, as I suspect, few people have
more than trivial problems with the ISP email, then let's leave
well enough alone.
This is from yesterday's New York Times:
WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 ? It started off early Wednesday as an
innocuous request from a North Carolina businessman to the
Homeland Security Department. He was responding to a daily
antiterrorism bulletin by asking that it be sent to another e-mail
address.
But by afternoon, a programming flaw involving the ?reply?
function transformed that e-mail message into a flood of more
than 2.2 million messages nationwide that clogged the e-mail
accounts of government and private experts on domestic
security, including the operators of an Illinois nuclear power
station.
-------
We're from the government, and we're here to help you.
I can't see why companies or ISP's should be expected to forward mail for you when you leave them... Oh, so you don't want to pay for AOL any more, you are switching to Comcast, but you still want us to maintain your email account and forward your mail? I don't think so...
The need to change email address when switching ISP's happens. You relocate, a better ISP comes along etc. But why rely on the email address that an ISP provides! It's so cheap today to register your own doman and get your own email address - or even addresses for the whole family (or small business). Even if you don't want to set up a web site, the cost of $15 or less per year to register an email address and $7 or less for hosting is well worth it in my opinion. Using a company like Godaddy.com is even cheaper if you just want email. And you get POP mail as well as webmail included.
So, having your own domain, you can move anywhere in the world, change ISP as many times as you want, continually expand the list of email addresses on your domain (if you have more kids etc), and never have to change your email address.
Just seems so easy to do.......
My 50cents worth for the day...
When I change banks, can I keep my old checking account number from the other bank? I liked it ever so much.
ugh.
However, News.com using "news"peak is a little frightening though. :)
Ignorance isn't an excuse, and the FCC isn't here to hold everyones hands while they cross the street.
Many don't know what a domain is, much less how to actually register one themselves. Free email is what they SHOULD use(hotmail, gmail, yahoo etc), but they don't realize it. They sign up for internet thru Aol or whoever and the ISP (AOL in this case) tells them "here is your email address" and they take it as gospel and go on their merry little way. They start getting comfortable at home being able to fire up outlook express (or maybe their favorite to their ISP's webmail page if they are lucky) and life is good for a while.
Then 1-2 years later, they decide dialup is not cutting it, or their internet is slow and they change ISP's or they move and can't get the same ISP. Suddenly its a crisis...what do you mean I can't have the same email address???!!!!!! I've given it to all my customers, friends, family, put it on my business card, advertised on yellow pages with it, I can REMEMBER IT FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!!!!....sorry...I was enjoying the part too much.
Please, save the nieve(sp?)...advise them to get a hotmail/gmail/yahoo account now.
however, back to the article at hand, I suggest mandating that ISP's forward email for 30 days. It costs the ISP virtually NO resources.
This woman doesn't understand anything about technology, this isn't even news.
Obviously, the author was giving an example where customerA@aol.com is moving to a new email address customerA@yahoo.com. Of course in the real world the likelihood of you being able to get such a "common" name when you move to another email provider is very small, however, it serves to transparently illustrate a person moving from one email provider to another, not to actually suggest that the very email addresses the author plucked out of his head were available.
There was no need to nit pick this closely.
Most of us know that domain email will follow us - ISP email will not.
Granted - the response on the part of AOL was immature and unprofessional at best.
When you move from a physical address - you must continuously renew your forwarding address or your mail will not arrive at its new destination. Me, as the new tenant, should not have to deal with your sloppiness relative to notifying those who snail mail you.
The expense involved will be passed down to us. We prefer to keep the Internet free and we prefer to maintain an ever learning atmosphere rather than a dumbing down atmosphere.
I agree with the author on this issue. There are plenty of free email providers out there which are not affiliated with an ISP. They are also generally more generous with storage, have many more bells & whistles to play with, & are much more secure.
I have changed addresses (& had them changed against my will), phone numbers, bank accounts & numbers, many times over my lifetime. Changing email addresses has always been the easiest to change by far. It ain't broke so let's not fix it. OK?
Smaller businesses (such as, perhaps, Ms. Mortenson) who might use such accounts are generally not in the habit of buying large stocks of stationery. And they would as likely move to a new office as change their email address. Again, the argument won't wash.
To be fair, it costs a bit more than the $10 domain registration fee, as most ISPs will not host the domain for you. But basic hosting, including multiple email accounts and Web space, and more other stuff than most small businesses will ever need, can be had for about $50 a year, including the domain.
I would suggest that the cost of email address changes -- which are (contrary to Ms. Mortenson's case) generally voluntary -- is simply part of the cost of doing business.
I have Google Apps for My Domain which is free and gives me up to 25 email boxes (through a catch-all and some creativity, actually unlimited email addresses) and calendar and docs. This is for my family's personal use, which seems like it would be exactly what a freelancer needs.
I would extend it a little bit more...
It will be nice to have Global-Email-and-small-Web-space (~ 1-2 MB) for all 6+ Billion of people. The time is right! ... 21 century!
4vladimir@gmail.com
- Learn how the system works!
- by olduser99 October 5, 2007 4:38 PM PDT
- I'm sorry, but I think people need to learn how computer systems work. If you know that this would be a non-issue...
- Reply to this comment
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Showing 1 of 2 pages (39 Comments)Now I've been on e-mail since 1995. I've changed e-mail addresses at least 10 times since then. It's really easy to just send an e-mail saying here is my new address....
Over that time... One company changed their domain name because of a merger. Now you expect them to keep that domain alive.... Don't think so...
Bottom line.... For a price you can have whatever you want... Thanks to some idiot that wanted the same phone number I get to pay a fee. No thanks.
I'd rather see net neutrality... Than this convenience for a few....