In the category of onerous regulation, it appears that the Israeli Knesset has approved a new law that would mandate email portability despite the fact that email was never designed to be portable.  This is similar to a failed attempt in the United States when a freelance writer Gail Mortenson petitioned the FCC for an immediate rule making.

Individual email addresses (e.g., someperson@somedomain.com) were never designed to be portable.  The “somedomain.com” portion is portable but only if the entire domain is moved, but the “someperson” portion must reside where ever somedomain.com resides.  While it’s possible to receive email at somedomain.com and forward it to anotherdomain.com, that requires the email to travel through somedomain.com before it can get to anotherdomain.com and this requires substantial resources.  This is completely different from the way that phone numbers, postal addresses, and domain names can all be directly diverted with minimal resources.

Phone numbers can be directly assigned to different telephone companies.  Postal addresses are all handled by the US Postal Service regardless of where a person lives which means the Postal Service can directly divert mail to the new address.  Domain names can be reassigned to a completely different owner and a completely different ISP.  Requiring email portability is like arguing that the US Postal Service should mail when the shipping fee was paid to FedEx.  Furthermore, even the Postal Service has a time limit on how long they will forward mail because it would become unmanageable as the forwarding database grew over time.

Gail Mortenson argued that there’s no “technical reason” not to require ISPs to forward customer@aol.com to customer@yahoo.com.  But if we’re going to use that line of reasoning, there’s no “technical reason” an ISP or cable TV company couldn’t continue providing broadband or TV service even if a customer stops paying for service.  So while there’s no technical reason, there are certainly economic reasons.  This type of regulation would force the ISP has to provide a free email forwarding service to non-paying customers indefinitely at the ISP’s expense.

There are already great email portability solutions in place for individuals and businesses.  They can buy their own domain name for $9/year and use this as their personal email account forever, and they can get any ISP to host this domain for them for a reasonable amount of money.