A new email account
Hello everybody!
This is just a short post to explain why I’ve moved to a new email account. I think it’s traditional to add “and why you should too” at the end, but I trust you, dear reader, will be able to read this and decide for yourself.
First of all, the facts. My main (pretty much only) email account for a long time has been with gmail. Now I’ve set up another account with a paid email provider.
The reasons for this are varied, but it has to do with free-market competition. Let’s start with the first company you think of when you think of a free-market: Microsoft.
Back in the day, Microsoft often complained about free software. Why should it be free? How could Microsoft possibly compete with free (in new markets and product categories where Microsoft hadn’t yet locked customers into their products)? I am, like almost all programmers, a big fan of free software and software works very well as a free thing. It costs very little money to write code. If a free-software project already does 99% of what you want, it’s easier to add the missing 1% than to write the whole thing from scratch, etc. etc. I trust you know the arguments for free software, dear reader.
Internet services are, however, a little different. Operating them actively costs money. Let’s take an example: WhatsApp.
WhatsApp is a bad idea, and we don’t have to assume that Facebook is doing something nefarious with the information flowing through WhatsApp. It is indisputable that Facebook is bank-rolling WhatsApp to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. How are other companies meant to compete with this? Once WhatsApp has customer lock-in (which it already does in many communities), what incentive is there for Facebook to make WhatsApp interoperable with other products or to keep on developing it? We saw this with IE6. At the time it was launched, it was a fairly advanced web browser, and then Microsoft did nothing with it. If I was being uncharitable, I would say that their strategy was clear: kill the web. Competition did come in the form of Firefox, but this could only succeed because of three things: firstly, a general hatred of Microsoft amongst many, secondly, the relative simplicity of web pages back then and thirdly, the fact that it was free. If Mozilla had had to raise money for the development of Firefox rather than getting millions from Google, it would never have been able to offer the browser for free.
It would be even more difficult to make a WhatsApp competitor free. How would you pay for the servers?
The moral of the story for me: don’t use WhatsApp, and I don’t. Instead I use Threema, which charges a one-time fee for the software (I’d prefer it to charge X Euros per month — it would be more honest). However there’s a problem with Threema, and the example of Google shines a spotlight on it.
So where does this leave gmail? Well, Google is in a strange position. As internet users we expect certain things to be free, like search engines, email providers, maps, calendars, photo and file storage (up to a certain amount). We expect to be able to access not just the results of millions of programmer-hours of work at the touch of a button, but also raise their running costs by using their servers. We complain when we can’t do this for free. If we were being honest, how much would we pay for the world’s best online maps, the world’s best search engine, the world’s best email?
Instead, Google has to find a way to make some money off this. They do this by showing you adds. Many people complain about this, basically saying (the most charitable reading): “Google should be forced to spend its money so it can fulfill my bidding”. Or, if I was being less charitable: “poor people should not have access to important internet services”.
Btw, I was listening to the 1password podcast recently (a software I would very much recommend) and the host said to the guest — an employee of Firefox — the old line about ‘if you are not paying for something, then you are the product’. A rather bad look.
So why am I paying for email? Well, I like the idea of competition. If somebody has running costs to provide me a service, then I like the transparency of paying directly. I now use a paid password manager, paid note-keeping and productivity software, a paid task-manager, a paid app for learning languages and a paid blogging platform. This works for me because I am, compared with 90% of the world’s population, rich. However, I certainly won’t say to people who use free-as-in-beer services: you are the product! But this is the problem of some paid internet services. Their financing model is transparent, but what if they are incompatible with the free alternatives? It would be classist of me to say that others also have to spend money if they want to communicate with me.
Fortunately email is an open format, so if you have an account with one email provider can read mails sent from another. This is unlike instant messengers, where they all use mutually incompatible formats (Google tried to get everyone to use the open XMPP format, but nobody else was interested). My email provider is posteo.de btw. They seem to be a nice lot, so check them out!
