But, if they did, would that imply that the state ought to provide a free home to anyone who needs it?
Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.
Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?
At least the state-registered address is required in many countries.
(Homeless people are still registered. The address might be a homelessness charity, or a whole city district.)
> Similarly, there's no state requirement to have a smartphone - or even a phone number. I understand that citizens of the USA can qualify for a state-provided phone and number, but I think that's quite rare.
True, also -- this is mostly based on my experience in Israel, not the USA, if that was accidentally implied. Here you do have some form of state-registered postal address (and can't remove, only change it), I don't know what homeless people have registered but from a brief check it's ignored if they're homeless. Instead, the city they're staying in handles it.
There's no smartphone requirement, but I'm not sure how they deal with someone who just doesn't have any phone, it's a requirement in a lot of auxiliary services.
> Given that there are a plethora of free email providers, why would the state step in to manipulate this market?
I thought that provisioning it with the relatively-new smart card IDs (i.e. certificate authentication) would allow for better starting security, less hacked accounts and such.
The so called “Obama phones”, not so rare…
They also have low-income landline programs, I believe, along with low-income home internet plans but I think the internet ones are for households with school age children judging by the radio ads I used to hear.
In some few countries & metro areas, people have decided to answer Yes to this question, so it’s not purely rhetorical.
Yes.