Comment by xp84
1 day ago
Just a reminder that about 40% of the email conversations in the last 20 years are already in Google’s possession with the identifying data. (About another 40% are in Microsoft’s.)
If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern.
Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve the customers for whom cheapness was the overwhelming single concern.
> the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE”
In the early pioneering days of the commercialized Internet, email addresses were inextricably linked to your ISP. You paid for an ISP connection and you got an email box, with MTA and MUA service to match. You were reluctant to switch or leave your ISP, because that also meant leaving behind your email address. Of course, a minority of nerds got around this with their own domains, etc.
However, it seems that Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and other players got into providing free email services and eventually grew into giants that supplanted every other MTA service. This was not an accident and it was not merely our appetite for “FREE” but it was a very calculated plan by the industry. Those early ISPs did not have a business model that admitted monetizing our private data; they seemed to have a more respectful attitude for keeping it private. Perhaps that was a result of being telecommunications-based companies, rather than advertising or entertainment.
If a service like email provides such endless treasure troves of personal data, including a social graph and glimpses into our private daily lives, why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself? The free email services killed the paid services, not by being better or cheaper, but by being bigger, centralized, and more persistent. The main reason I signed up for Yahoo! was because it would be an utterly stable presence. I saw my parents and others so hopelessly attached to an ISP-based email, but I couldn't end up like that.
After streaks of losing my home and non-payment of bills and moving around over decades, the most stable point of contact for me has been a "free" email address.
> why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself?
Interesting proposition. It seems to me like the first round of this (Hotmail, Yahoo, the free types of accounts AOL offered, Juno, etc) was not about monetizing the data, but about acquiring sticky loyal traffic for their overall portals, to monetize with ads. Remember in the early days you'd log into Yahoo or whatever and the first thing you'd see was your inbox, then later on all these services added a welcome page that would have a bunch of "news/sports/entertainment" type stories, ads, and links to more Yahoo! services. Email was being used then as a loss leader to guarantee you'll be returning several times a week minimum.
I believe it was Google who broke the seal on reading our email to show us targeted ads.
I hear what you're saying that especially for those who go through exceptional circumstances, a free email untethered to any billing account is useful.[1] But it's still sad to me that that concept - admittedly very compelling to Gen-X and millennials who were going through the chaos of college in the 90s and 2000s when email was becoming popular - ended up cementing this idea forever. Both by establishing these identities on a few popular commercial domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com, and by setting the expectation that "email shouldn't cost even $1 a year." Most of us pay $60-100 a month for an ISP and another $60-100 a month for a cell phone plan, and $0 of that money pays for email.
[1] I'd argue that for everyone fortunate enough to have more stability of accounts, homes and such, the "moving" problems could have been easily solved by a regulation kind of like cell phone number portability, which shockingly worked out quite well.
Speaking from the perspective of someone who experienced the beginning of the Internet in one of the places where it began...
The real difference with phones is that they come with their own network, which vaguely incorporates the internetworking protocols. In the pioneering days of the internet, the ISP was the closest thing to you which was actually connected to the Internet. Early email paid attention to store-and-forward protocols, nowadays mailing lists are forced to use DKIM in order to deliver to the large ESPs and can't get it right.
The availability of network connectivity is much more pervasive today, clearly store-and-forward has mostly gone away. (Not to be confused with MTA-MTA hops, although these days most of my mail has exactly one hop on the actual Internet, again demonstrating the pervasiveness of connectivity.)
Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but Facebook was (dunno if they're still in the phone business) the de facto ISP for large numbers of people in the third world.