That's right - the Turkish government is issuing an email address along with an every new identity card. From birth, Turkish citizens will have their very own, government hosted email address, with up to 10GB of storage space.
Couple quick thoughts...
1) Do you remember how hard it was to come up with your own screen name for AOL? This definitely gets rid of that stress, furthermore, as all imagineable names get taken up in yahoo, hotmail and gmail, this ensures that everyone who is born gets a standard identity that belongs to them.
2) The libertarian in me can't help but worry - if the government is issuing the email address, and hosting, then it also will have access to everything you do. This announcement comes hot on the tail of Turkey declaring that it was launching its own search engine due to "security concerns". Let's put it this way, do we feel better about a place like Google having ALL of our information, or the government? (Some argue it's picking between the same evil....)
3) The power that companies like Google are capitalizing on is increasingly drawing the attention of foreign governments. Either these governments are worried that too much information is being concentrated into the hands of few firms (most of them being American), or they are seeking to have access to this information and firms like Google aren't giving it up. Either way, it's a lot of power to be concentrated, and the more power is aggregated in firms like Google, the greater the headway they're going to encounter from Governments.
4) Is the Turkish government going to build its own facebook? That might be a bit weird....
Fore more info, check out :
http://thenextweb.com/europe/2009/11/28/turkey-give-70-million-citizens-email-address-search-engine/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+TheNextWeb+(The+Next+Web)&utm_content=Google+Reader