Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.
Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.
USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).
> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.
Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.
You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.
Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...
You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.
The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.
So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.
There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.
Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.
And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.
With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.
"The gov't should pay for it" is not a solution to private problems.
Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).
Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?
I’m just glad others feel this way.
Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.