Over the last five years I've had a dozen friends suffer from the email 
dilemma described below.

This [reprinted] article explains why you should think about buying your 
own domain name, and thus protect yourself from this kind of recurring 
problem forever.  I hope you find it useful.

                                                                         -- 
John Tranter

____________________________________________

Declare E-Mail Independence
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The Net Effect   By Simson Garfinkel    July/August 2002

Big e-mail providers snap their fingers, and the masses obey, like sheep. 
But there's a way to reclaim control.

This past March, I started getting dozens of e-mails from upset but 
resigned AT&T Broadband customers. All said more or less the same thing: 
their e-mail addresses were about to stop working. I had to update my 
address book to change the letters after the @ sign from “mediaone.net” to 
“attbi.com.”

More than 630,000 AT&T customers were forced to make this change. [....]

[If they each told fifteen friends to change their address lists,
that's more than ten million changes that would need to be made. -- J.T.]

Few people realize just how much control over the increasingly pervasive 
medium of e-mail they have tacitly conceded. Many, for instance, think that 
they somehow own their e-mail addresses. Wrong! Legally and technically, 
the company, university or individual who owns the computer systems behind 
an e-mail address controls all aspects of the accounts it serves. In fact, 
the addresses belong to the company whose name comes after the @. (In the 
case of mediaone.net, AT&T relinquished the name to another Media One, an 
advertising agency in Sioux Falls, SD, to settle a lawsuit.)

You may think you’re entitled to an e-mail address because you’ve 
religiously paid some Internet service provider your monthly subscription 
fee for years. That’s not the case. Your provider can cancel your e-mail 
account for any reason and bounce your e-mail. Or it can give your 
username—and your e-mail!—to somebody else. Or it can lock you out of your 
account and read your e-mail without your permission. (Having owned a small 
Internet service provider since 1995, I know well the responsibilities and 
dilemmas that come with this awesome power.)

In one case that I know [....] a friend lost her Internet account after she 
got into an argument with the firm providing her Internet service. But 
rather than canceling her username, the provider simply changed her 
password. Mail to her old address accumulated for months, unread. People 
who send messages to her old address still get the response that her 
mailbox is full.

E-mail is tremendously different from the two other addressing systems that 
we use routinely—postal addresses and telephone numbers. Because postal 
addresses are covered by a huge body of regulations and laws, and because 
most are linked to physical locations, they work pretty much the way we 
expect them to [....]

Telephone numbers [....] are increasingly regarded by law as the property 
of the person or organization to which they connect. In fact, the 1996 U.S. 
Telecommunications Act specifically requires telephone companies to create 
a framework for telephone number portability, so that businesses and 
residences can switch phone service providers without losing their phone 
numbers.

But the Telecommunications Act was silent on the subject of e-mail 
addresses. The U.S. Congress didn’t think to mandate e-mail address 
portability. It didn’t even mandate the next best thing—e-mail forwarding. 
If you are an America Online user and decide that you want to switch to 
another Internet provider, the only thing you can do is send mail to all of 
your correspondents, telling them of your new address. AOL will not forward 
your mail.

What’s so distressing about this state of affairs is that there is a simple 
solution to the problem of e-mail address portability. Every person and 
every company should get a unique domain name.

Recall that the domain name is the part of the e-mail address after the @ 
sign. [....]

Nowadays you can get your own domain name for less than $25 a year from any 
of a number of companies. And these names are portable—that is, you can 
take them with you from one Internet service provider to another.

Of course, people are taught to be sheep for a reason. Customers tied to 
@attbi.com or @aol.com addresses are inhibited from switching to a rival 
service provider—which ultimately means that the companies don’t have to 
compete as hard. That’s why neither AT&T nor AOL has worked to make it easy 
for customers to have their own domains.

In the 21st century, having your own domain name is simple electronic 
self-defense. Alas, many people find it easier to be sheep.

Simson Garfinkel writes on information technology and its impact. He is the 
author of Database Nation (O'Reilly, 2000).

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                      J T

      from John Tranter

   >  Editor, Jacket magazine: http://jacketmagazine.com/

       (please note the new Internet address)

   >  homepage - poetry, reviews, etc, at: http://www.austlit.com/jt/
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