Written by Kevin Purdy

When it launched, millions of us grabbed free Gmail addresses, and associated Calendar, Docs, Voice, and other apps followed. But personal domains are cheap, and claiming an @yourname.com address to use with Google Apps is easier than ever. Here’s why you should.

Future-Proof Email Address that You Control

It’s scary, but it’s true: There’s a possibility that Gmail might not always be the coolest email service in the world. For all we know of the future, there might be two hackers in a garage right now re-inventing the inbox. There might be some desktop software that merges the convenience of the cloud with killer OS integration. Or you might just decide some day that, heck, Yahoo has more of what you need, or that Google’s reach across your data is too deep.

You should have an email address that’s as portable as your cellphone number—meaning you can switch email providers without losing your current address. With your default @gmail.com address, that’s not really an option. With your personal domain, it is.

Sure, if you’re using a Gmail address, you can technically access your account from other clients through IMAP, auto-forward email, and otherwise stream your messages out. But if you ever decide on a new line of work, a different kind of username (sayonara, SpookyPrince15@gmail.com), or a new email service, you’re better off having your own domain. Your options for forwarding and import are more robust when you control your own domain, and you never have to send one of those click-and-pray “Hey everyone I’ve ever emailed throughout time—my address has changed!” messages.

With Google Apps installed on your own domain, your data is still running through Google’s own servers. But Google’s pretty good about portability, and if it starts looking like they won’t be down the road, you’ve got side door where you can step on out and maintain your identity elsewhere. The great part about using your own domain is that you’re not tied to any one email service provider. You can pick up and move your domain to another email provider any time you want.

Professional Polish, Family Friendly

Maybe your Gmail address is a bit better than PookieLuv4Life@gmail.com. Gmail, too, holds a more proper imprimatur than AOL, Hotmail, or other eyebrow-raising domains. It still holds true that having an email account on your own server, with a name you can change at any time, makes good sense.

If you do freelance work on the side, it’s easy to create another account (design@smith.com), one that pipes into your main personal account (john@smith.com). If you decide to help organize a fundraiser, it’s a few minutes to create another account for that (fundraise@smith.com), one that doesn’t give away your personal address to folks you’ll only message once or twice. When your kids get to the age where they get web-savvy, you can set them up with an email address (tina@smith.com and johnjr@smith.com) that you have ultimate control over. And for relatives with occasional tech troubles, you can throw them a lifeline and set them up on your server, too.

It’s Not That Painful to Switch

The hardest part about getting your own domain name these days is finding a URL that isn’t taken—and that’s only hard if someone has already registered your exact name. Get a little creative, use a reliable but cheap name registrar, buy a little hosted space and set up the free Google Apps on that domain—some hosts do that automatically for you. And nearly every mobile platform where Google offers some kind of syncing, an Apps address works just fine.

Note: For a full walkthrough of switching from a Gmail account to Google Apps, read Whitson’s detailed take on migrating your entire Google account to a new one.

When you’ve got a domain name and space, you’ll find that nearly all of Google’s services are available to Apps users. Not every single app, as commenter mawcs points out, but if you can live without History, Buzz, Google Storage, Health, Powermeter, and Profiles, or at least live without for the time being, you’re on your way. Even if you have other Google-assisted domains to log into or control, there is an early version of multi-account sign-in available that covers the Apps basics.

In other words, it’s possible to live out the entire Google experience—Mail, Calendars, Sync, Docs, even Voice—with your own domain name, rather than Google’s Gmail.

That’s just one editor’s thoughts on Gmail, email, and data portability—and after writing it, he’s pretty set on practicing what he’s preaching himself. Share your own thoughts and decisions on migrating from Gmail to Apps—or why you won’t—in the comments.

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Written by Shirky

Like a lot of people, I am conflicted about Wikileaks.

Citizens of a functioning democracy must be able to know what the state is saying and doing in our name, to engage in what Pierre Rosanvallon calls “counter-democracy”*, the democracy of citizens distrusting rather than legitimizing the actions of the state. Wikileaks plainly improves those abilities.

On the other hand, human systems can’t stand pure transparency. For negotiation to work, people’s stated positions have to change, but change is seen, almost universally, as weakness. People trying to come to consensus must be able to privately voice opinions they would publicly abjure, and may later abandon. Wikileaks plainly damages those abilities. (If Aaron Bady’s analysis is correct, it is the damage and not the oversight that Wikileaks is designed to create.*)

And so we have a tension between two requirements for democratic statecraft, one that can’t be resolved, but can be brought to an acceptable equilibrium. Indeed, like the virtues of equality vs. liberty, or popular will vs. fundamental rights, it has to be brought into such an equilibrium for democratic statecraft not to be wrecked either by too much secrecy or too much transparency.

As Tom Slee puts it, “Your answer to ‘what data should the government make public?’ depends not so much on what you think about data, but what you think about the government.”* My personal view is that there is too much secrecy in the current system, and that a corrective towards transparency is a good idea. I don’t, however, believe in total transparency, and even more importantly, I don’t think that independent actors who are subject to no checks or balances is a good idea in the long haul.

If the long haul were all there was, Wikileaks would be an obviously bad thing. The practical history of politics, however, suggests that the periodic appearance of such unconstrained actors in the short haul is essential to increased democratization, not just of politics but of thought.

We celebrate the printers of 16th century Amsterdam for making it impossible for the Catholic Church to constrain the output of the printing press to Church-approved books*, a challenge that helped usher in, among other things, the decentralization of scientific inquiry and the spread of politically seditious writings advocating democracy.

This intellectual and political victory didn’t, however, mean that the printing press was then free of all constraints. Over time, a set of legal limitations around printing rose up, including restrictions on libel, the publication of trade secrets, and sedition. I don’t agree with all of these laws, but they were at least produced by some legal process.

Unlike the United States’ current pursuit of Wikileaks.*

I am conflicted about the right balance between the visibility required for counter-democracy and the need for private speech among international actors. Here’s what I’m not conflicted about: When authorities can’t get what they want by working within the law, the right answer is not to work outside the law. The right answer is that they can’t get what they want.

The Unites States is — or should be — subject to the rule of law, which makes the extra-judicial pursuit of Wikileaks especially nauseating. (Calls for Julian’s assassination are even more nauseating.) It may be that what Julian has done is a crime. (I know him casually, but not well enough to vouch for his motivations, nor am I a lawyer.) In that case, the right answer is to bring the case to a trial.

IIn the US, however, the government has a “heavy burden” for engaging in prior restraint of even secret documents, an established principle since New York Times Co. vs. The United States*, when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. If we want a different answer for Wikileaks, we need a different legal framework first.

Though I don’t like Senator Joseph Lieberman’s proposed SHIELD law (Securing Human Intelligence and Enforcing Lawful Dissemination*), I do like the fact that it is a law, and not an extra-legal avenue (of which Senator Lieberman is also guilty.*) I also like the fact that the SHIELD Law makes it clear what’s at stake: the law proposes new restraints on publishers, and would apply to the New York Times and The Guardian as it well as to Wikileaks. (As Matthew Ingram points out, “Like it or not, Wikileaks is a media entity.”*) SHIELD amounts to an attempt to reverse parts of New York Times Co. vs. The United States.

I don’t think such a law should pass. I think the current laws, which criminalize the leaking of secrets but not the publishing of leaks, strike the right balance. However, as a citizen of a democracy, I’m willing to be voted down, and I’m willing to see other democratically proposed restrictions on Wikileaks put in place. It may even be that whatever checks and balances do get put in place by the democratic process make anything like Wikileaks impossible to sustain in the future.

The key, though, is that democracies have a process for creating such restrictions, and as a citizen it sickens me to see the US trying to take shortcuts. The leaders of Myanmar and Belarus, or Thailand and Russia, can now rightly say to us “You went after Wikileaks’ domain name, their hosting provider, and even denied your citizens the ability to register protest through donations, all without a warrant and all targeting overseas entities, simply because you decided you don’t like the site. If that’s the way governments get to behave, we can live with that.”

Over the long haul, we will need new checks and balances for newly increased transparency — Wikileaks shouldn’t be able to operate as a law unto itself anymore than the US should be able to. In the short haul, though, Wikileaks is our Amsterdam. Whatever restrictions we eventually end up enacting, we need to keep Wikileaks alive today, while we work through the process democracies always go through to react to change. If it’s OK for a democracy to just decide to run someone off the internet for doing something they wouldn’t prosecute a newspaper for doing, the idea of an internet that further democratizes the public sphere will have taken a mortal blow.

Nice burn, Wikileaks.

Bonus: Don’t try this at home kids