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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 ? .
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.
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.
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.