Even leaving all negative conservatives of this decision aside for now, it hardly does solves anything.
If thomasted110 is the best what's available for now at yahoo, there will be, simplifying a bit, 109 another unhappy users (thomasted1..thomasted109) + tedthomas_xx users + other unhappy Ted Thomases settled for different username at yahoo.com.
None of them is aware if tedthomas will be available. Most of them will not even know that this grand redistribution will take place. In the end if tedthomas will be "reused" only one of them will be moderately happy, while others are no better of.
Thought about it, but doesn't sounds quite right too: Yahoo didn't use these identities, it provided them to the users.
Anyway I don't want to be pedantic here, just as long as it was clear what I tried to say, and nobody misunderstood that I accuse Yahoo literary selling its user accounts to the third party, I am happy. :)
They are not discontinuing their product line or even canceling service for some of its customers.
What they do is effectively transferring online identities they granted from less deserving, from their perspective, users to more deserving ones.
There is a lot of problems with this from both from security and moral points of view.
This is a way worse then just disabling unused old accounts and, say, deleting emails stored there.
Yahoo is going to "resell"(1) these accounts. This will create all kind of privacy problems, and potential for abuse: gaining access to other services through resetting passwords there, impersonating users, people receiving private communications not intended for them, etc.
And all this for what purpose? Give few lucky ones get a coveted email address like [email protected] instead of [email protected]?
(1) "Resell" is the not quite accurate word here as they are going to give it for free, but I can't come with a better word.