Addressing a New Issue: E-Mail for All

AUSTIN, Texas — A newly emerging problem with the Internet that needs more attention is attached to a basic feature of online communication that most people take for granted: Internet accounts.

The need for an account to access the Internet has its historical roots in the old days of time sharing, when large computers split their processing time between “jobs” or procedures, and produced different results for different users. A computer user would sit at a terminal and log in, and the log-in identity would tell the computer which job was requested by which user.

Now, the standard Internet address is familiar to everyone, with its characteristic “@” symbol, as is the increasingly ubiquitous signature of a Web page address--the URL or uniform resource location, which now shows up in TV ads, movie trailers and business cards.

But there are some unexpected social ramifications to the use of such identifiers. Experienced Internet users are accustomed to the rough hierarchy of “status” Internet addresses--America Online accounts, for example, have allegedly lower status than addresses that feature personalized domain names, the cyberspace version of vanity license plates.

One of the new problems associated with Internet accounts has to do with nascent efforts to make e-mail and Internet access a basic utility available to everyone.

In 1995, Rand Corp., the Santa Monica-based research institution, released a report calling for universal e-mail for all U.S. citizens, something the researchers estimated would cost about $1 billion per year in government subsidies. The Rand report noted that e-mail is rapidly replacing postal mail; the volume of e-mail on the Internet in the U.S. surpassed the volume of mail handled by the Postal Service two years ago.

There wasn’t much enthusiasm for the Rand report, and it didn’t produce much momentum. Conservatives weren’t happy with the idea of a new government subsidy, and civil libertarians were wary of the idea of a “government e-mail address.”

As the Rand authors acknowledged, millions of Americans cannot afford personal computers or modems, let alone Internet accounts through an Internet service provider, or ISP.

The only viable solution to providing Internet access to low-income people is through public access stations. Many communities throughout the U.S. are experimenting with public access to the Internet, often through libraries. But the requirement of an Internet account to use e-mail is creating some frustrating problems.

It’s technically very difficult for an ISP running a public access system to provide thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of Internet accounts that may be used only infrequently. E-mail client software, for example, is commonly programmed to be used by one user who sets the account name permanently.

Eudora Light, a widely used public domain program for accessing and sending e-mail, has ways to handle different account names, but the user has to have his or her own settings file. That means bringing to the public access station a diskette with a file that has the right format, the right version number and the correct information--a fairly onerous requirement.

HotMail is a commercial venture that offers free e-mail accounts that can be accessed through any World Wide Web browser (https://www.hotmail.com); the system is supported by advertisers, who send their ads to the HotMail users. But on a public access computer, a user can see a previous user’s HotMail messages by using the browser’s “back” key, unless the HotMail user has cleared the “cache” of the browser. That’s a serious privacy flaw.

The telephone model is worth looking at closely. People make telephone calls from pay phones anonymously, and it’s now routine for low-income customers to buy phone cards that provide a set length of long-distance time. But the requirement of a named account on the Internet makes both these benefits problematic on the Net. It’s difficult to be anonymous without being an expert at manipulating account names, and there’s currently no system that allows someone to buy intermittent access.

Someday, perhaps, Internet addresses could have a status similar to a postal address. Today, if you have a home address or a post office box number, you’re guaranteed postal delivery. You “pay” for this right by simply living somewhere, or signing up at a post office or private mailbox company.

But your use of the Postal Service doesn’t require having a return address--anyone can buy a stamp and send a letter. The Postal Service thus features several benefits that the Internet currently can’t provide: guaranteed anonymity, the separation of mailing and receiving mail, and both pay-per-use as well as a “right” to mail delivery.

There are both technical and policy challenges involved in making the Internet a truly universal medium of communication. Software vendors should turn their attention to a new category of software products: “public access” applications. And policymakers should start to think about how we can reproduce the benefits of older forms of communication using new online technologies.

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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. He can be reached at [email protected]