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How The Postman Almost Owned E-Mail
Thrawn writes "'Imagine that the U.S. Postal Service was in charge of e-mail. Sound absurd? It does to most people until they realize that it almost happened.' " I think the chance of it actually happening are massively overstated in this article, but it's still an interesting "What If". But about as likely, as say, The Confederacy ? winning the US Civil War ? .
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*? Frankly, I think if the USPS had their own E-mail service, things wouldn't be so different, because there's no way any court would ever hold up an order to prevent other people from running other E-mail services. Sensationalism sucks.
The article talks about an electronic service where you could transmit electronic messages between roughly 25 post offices. The messages would be printed out and then hand delivered like normal mail.
Honestly I don't see how this is anything like email, which is 100% electronic.
- Why I like email? Because there's no mail man for my dog to bite.
Eh? The Civil War wasn't about slavery. Slavery was abolished more as a punitive measure against the Southern states than as a goal of the war. Lincoln stated flatly that his goal was to preserve the Union -- whether with such preservation every slave was freed, some slaves were freed, or no slaves were freed.
Doesn't do so well for the view of the Northerners as the heroes in white, fighting to save the oppressed minority, but then neither side's motives could be called entirely pure.
yeah - it was mainly an economic war, the Emancipation Proclimation was made late in the war and didn't even free slaves in the Northern states so as not to lose the border states' support :)
Who is it at Technology Review that keeps churning out these historically-illiterate might-have-been stories? Last time it was somebody arguing that we could have had cell phones in the 1930s if it hadn't been for the KGB, or something equally absurd.
Hm, yes, so scary. What on earth would it be like if the USPS had offered the first e-mail service?
- USPS has very strict government regulations regarding privacy. Less distribution of your email address.
- USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address. We wouldn't get more spam... instead, we'd be reasonably sure that if we never gave out our email addresses, we'd never get *any* spam. Not so with many (most?) of today's ISPs.
- Post offices are literally everywhere in the country. People who currently find email inacessible because they're in the boondocks might not be in this situation.
Fact is, if the post office had gone ahead with development of electronic mail, it probably would have been a lot like the proprietary services (i.e. AOL, CompuServe) before the internet boom. ARPA still would have seen a need for the internet, they still would have gone to university research (TCP/IP was invented at a public institution, with government money... and look how horrible it turned out), and USPS along with everyone else would have been scrambling to make themselves compatible with it.
The worst possible thing I can think of is that maybe those millions of AOL subscribers who currently have no concept of what the internet is, but manage to rampage across it anyway, would instead be USPS subscribers. Would that really be worse?
government != evil.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
I've seen this already, and personally, I think it's a lot of crap. What is he suggesting? That any other systems of E-mail aside from ones controlled by the USPS would be *illegal*?
Exactly.
The USPS has a long history of using federal law to stamp out competing mail services.
The usual excuse is that it undermines fixed-rate universal service by "cherry-picking" the inespensive job of delivering mail in and between cities or their business-office cores, which subsidizes the mail in rural areas. Federal law gives them a monopoly on first class mail and its equivalents (sealed point-to-point message) and they have enforced it jealously in the past.
- Against many private competing mail carriers.
- Against bicycle couriers. (Sometimes they'd let them carry and deliver IF you also bought a stamp.)
- Against (shutting down) a pneumatic-tube package-deleivery system in Manhattan.
and so on.
I think they tried against Fax but the Bell system slapped them down. (They're a regulated monopoly.) Fedex initially got away with it because they promise overnight delivery (not available from USPS at the time) for a much HIGHER price than first-class mail.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
This one is porbably going to get way moded down, but has anytone stopped to consider what the benefits of a federally owned and operated internet/email system might be? We always gripe about how are rights online are rapidly vanishing, but stop to consider that since the Internet is (at least in the US) owned by private institutions, you really have no rights. Think of it this way; your ISP's EULA generally lets them disconnect you for just about any reason under the sun, which allows them to exercise whatever "discretion" they wish in removing you for doing something that they consider bad. What one isp allows, another forbids. One of the chief benefits of a government internet is that such a system would necessitate granting the user clearly documented rights and restrictions. The wonderful world of "due process" might even be within our grasp.
As it stands, unless you do something that violates some law, anything relating specifically to Internet and ISPs is a civil matter. Think about it; what part of the EULA says that the sysadmin won't decide to read your email? Who says that they won't be watching your traffic?
The difference between the real world and the net is that in the real world, there is a buffer between the common citizen and exploitation by corporations. It is sad that that buffer thins every day, it really is, but the Internet is a world where industry dominates. This has allowed it to grow extremely fast, and also unchecked.
Consider the negatives of a Federal Internet, and I don't think you'll find they would require anything of you that law doesn't allow them to do now.
Frightening as it may be, federalizing the Internet may be the first step to securing our rights online. Then again, the beauty of voting for Nader knowing that he is not going to win is that you don't have to consider that he might not be the best person for the job.
The post office is nothing but another example of failed socialism, and should be phased out and replaced with market solutions which offer an incentive to deliver (pardon the pun ;). The answer is to allow the market to supply the demand by voluntary means, instead of by coercion (the tool of government).
Really, I'd rather have a small amount of my tax dollars put towards a e-mail account that I know will be there for the rest of my life. (As opposed to getting a "free" account with a .com that might not be there tomorrow.) Not only that, but since it's paid for by taxes, you won't have to worry about the gov't selling your e-mail for extra $$$ (In an ideal world anyway.)
I'm not saying that the USPS should be the only one providing e-mail, but I don't think it would be the horrible thing that everyone is making it out to be.
Look, the United States Postal Service does a damn good job for the money. Bitch if you want about the thirty-seven cents, but why don't you try hiring a cab to hand-deliver your envelope door-to-door and maybe that'll give some idea what the service is really worth. The USPS has been getting a bum rap for decades now for doing nothing less than a fantastic job with shit for a budget.
The USPS is also a serious proponent of Linux, having deployed more than 5400 Linux boxes internally to do address scanning and recognition. Google for "Linux USPS", it's the first unsponsored link.
I'm trying real hard here to think how the USPS could fuck up the Internet any worse than Adelphia or Qwest, and if there is something more nefarious that they could've done, it escapes me.
As others have pointed out, the USPS could not just come in and 'own' e-mail, they could provide an e-mail service, that people would use only if it provided enough value to justify the cost.
Most likely, the main users would have been business customers, who were willing to pay for the services.
Having a central, semi-trusted authority, employing sound technologies, could have taken e-mail much farther than it is today. Features like:
- Useful encrypted e-mail (i.e. a central certificate authority, with a strong registration process).
- Based on a modern protocol with some assurances of identity. SMTP is trivial to spoof, but is so widespread it's impossible to replace. It would take an organization with some clout to promote a new open standard.
- SPAM control
When people hear of the USPS doing e-mail, they think of their local mail carriers and laugh. Obviously it would not be run by those people, it would be a group of trained specialists designing and implementing it.
Of course, I still would not trust them with my e-mail, or pay them for the service. But, I bet my employer would. And, I bet I would use the GNU version of their open standards and strong security on my Linux box.
But about as likely, as say, The Confederacy winning the US Civil War.
;)
The, ahem, War of Northern Aggression hasn't been lost yet. The South shall rise again!
Anyone who thinks this is funny doesn't live in the south.
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Before the whole WorldCom shitstorm went down, I would have violently argued against the idea of treating email as a centrally-administered national resource.
Now, it looks like my pop.net email address -- for which I've been paying $20/month for the last several years on the grounds that I didn't think UUNet would ever go away -- might well become worthless before long.
I'm pissed and disillusioned at the same time. It really does appear that any sufficiently-large corporation is indistinguishable from an incompetent government. Perhaps there actually would be some value in a USPS-administered email option in the marketplace. One address, guaranteed for life, immune to the slings and arrows of corporate greed and idiocy, where spammers would have to answer to Federal postal inspectors.
Honestly, I'd probably sign up. Email may turn out to be one of those things the private sector just doesn't handle very well.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
kajillions dollars of taxes it gets every year?
This kind of attitude makes me sick. It's like you don't mind being screwed as long as someone doesn't do better. That's the king of mediocre egalitarianism that brought about communism.
You wrote:
...and because they can...
> - USPS has very strict government regulations regarding privacy. Less distribution of your email address.
Well, let's stop at "strict regulations regarding privacy". Just read your AT&T/AOL/WhateverISP user agreement. Things that boil down to "thou shall not trade MP3s or movies", "thou shall not send anything offensive to anybody", etc, etc, etc. Plus, they retain the "right" to check.
The Postal Service has very strict regulations on who, when, and where your mail may be opened and inspected...maybe watered down a little since 11 Sep, but still very strong.
Fedex, UPS, and the other commercial carriers have no such restrictions on limiting and checking the contents of packages and are not consistent in how they apply rules, anyway. Some time ago there was the story of a package of Playboy magazines that got intercepted during transit by one of the commercial carriers and was destroyed (or maybe returned) for being "obscene" material.
> - USPS is non-profit. Less *motivation* to sell your email address...
Well, they DO sell your home address to commercial interests, but they do so because of the results of competition with electronic services: email and online ordering and bill-paying. Once they came along, there was very little incentive to send a letter to someone...just email 'em. You can even send 'em an electronic greeting card. Why buy a stamp to mail a bill when you can do it online conveniently?
The Post Office's revenue sank, so they had to make up for some of it by selling your address to marketers. They're bastards for doing it, but had sound business reasons to do so.
Most online marketers sell your personal info merely to inflate profits.
An email system run by the Post Office with competition from the private sector as well would have made everybody better off.
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Only it isn't going to happen because the government doesn't like encryption and the post office is (probably) too clueless to actually set up the necessary servers and keep them secure enough for it all to work.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This would put it out of the hands of most peer communication (unless you wanted to be official about something), but it would still be very useful. Maybe they'd have accounts associated with a public key, you'd put money in the account, and then sign your messages that you sent to post office emails (which would also increase overall security when doing official business). You could provide a PDF attachment to compliment the plaintext, and they could print and deliver that if you didn't read the email within a certain amount of time (perhaps that you yourself specify in the email).
It could be a pretty slick system, really. And when I think about it, I'd trust the post office as a PK certification authority much more than any other institution (public or private) that I can think of. Verisign is evil, and they're what comes out of private authorities. From the FBI I'd expect Clipper chip, Echelon, or other security-compromising malicious activity. But the post office is pretty damned good at security (massive, mundane security, like not opening letters). And they are politically neutral, while most other government agencies are not. And they don't gouge the market, whether or not they are a monopoly, unlike private industry. And they are democratic, creating a real infrastructure even in areas where there isn't profit to be made.