THE GUARDIAN: ‘This screws us royally,’ says one disgruntled iiNet user as internet service providers such as Telstra and TPG curtail email accounts for customers
After 30 years, Simon* is facing the prospect of moving.
“I think we’ve been using their products since we built the house,” he says. “We’ve gone through dial-up and then eventually there was an ADSL connection.”
The Canberra-based iiNet customer has had the same email address since the 1990s. For millennials and younger, the notion of getting your email address from the company you pay for broadband might seem antiquated. Free online services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Outlook and others not tied to the internet provider are the default. It is now not uncommon for someone to set up their own email address in a domain of their choosing.
But in the nascent days of the internet before Google and Microsoft were the online internet behemoths, getting your email address from your internet service provider was the norm, and even attractive as a bundle package – and a way for internet providers to lock you into their service.
The cost for relatively small – by comparison to Google – companies to offer the service has gone up in server and administration costs without the economies of scale. » | Josh Taylor | Saturday, August 19, 2023
