No, You Can’t Take It With You
October 4th, 2007 by Peter SudermanLook, we’re all very fond of our email addresses, and these days, it’s often helpful — though far from critical — to maintain some stability in our email addresses. But Declan McCullagh is absolutely right when he says that the FCC mandating that ISPs must provide “email portability” is a very, very bad idea. Apparently a freelance writer here in D.C. got into a tiff with AOL when it canceled one of her email addresses and now wants companies to be forced to offer automatic mail forwarding. To which Declan responds:
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…
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 can’t imagine that the FCC will take this proposal seriously. Email is so widely and easily used, and there’s very little outcry for this. Plenty of people change their email addresses — just as they change their telephone numbers — on a pretty regular basis; when they change jobs, find a provider they prefer, get bored of their old online identity, etc. The idea that the FCC needs to step in and “do something” here is very silly indeed.
