Ask HN: Why isn't email a government service? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why isn't email a government service?

5 pointspeterlk6 comments

I'm wondering if any of the folks here were "there" when there were battles about this (if there ever were any). Email seems to me like a good candidate for a government-provided electronic service. Even if management were contracted out to a private entity, providing emails to all residents of a geography (city/province/state/etc.) seems like a useful thing for government to do. You could use it as an official means of communication to residents, and provide a baseline for digital presence of your citizens. Email standards are now very mature and stable (enough so for every SME to be constantly iterating on their security abstractions). Why doesn't government provided email seem to exist anywhere? Universities do it. Why not government?

I can speculate about all kinds of reasons that this didn't happen, but I was too young to have watched the city council meetings where this might have been discussed. Does such a thing exist in China? Finland? Norway? The Netherlands? Anywhere?

Absolutely would not be a good candidate for a gov service in the US. Imagine the politicization currently applied to the Postal Service, but on the scale of everyone's email?

The postal service is a federal service. If email offerings were, say, a municipal service, it seems like the Feds would have a much harder time regulating it. The federal government in the US can certainly put pressure on municipalities, but it wouldn't be compulsory - for example, university emails don't need to be used as a primary email except for specific, university-related circumstances.

This argument could easily be extended to private businesses. The government has the capability of putting pressure on private entities to compel them to treat email in certain ways. The rule of law prevents such things, and I don't really want to start a thread about how the current administration has no regard for the rule of law.

Furthermore, not everywhere is the US. Why hasn't Germany done this? Or Australia? Or Singapore?

Because it's already distributed. Better targets for government services would be things that are owned by monopolies.

What you may be missing from the history of email is that when it started, it was never about universal communication. It was internal communication within your own organization or between connected orgs. Frankly, it was a bit of a revolution when it started to be able to route outside your own network. And it wasn't always across the internet - while certainly IP-based email existed on the early networks, there were also modem-based email networks which were used by local communities and even for cross-organization email systems.

So unless you consider the entire population of a country to be a single organization, it makes little sense for them to have looked into running an email service.

You're right, I didn't know that. Thanks!

In the US, this could be a municipal service (my.name@themunicipality.emailservice.mystate.gov), and then we treat everyone in a geography as an organization. This feels a bit more likely to represent an "organization", especially for smaller municipalities. I would expect service availability and quality to vary widely between different municipalities - similarly to how parks, bike lanes, and other infrastructure quality vary widely between municipalities.

Self-hosted is the better way to do services, not centralised in the government.

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