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by fc417fc802 360 days ago
Phone service is recognized as a public utility. What difference justifies the failure to label internet service as a public utility?

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.
1 comments
Workaccount2 360 days ago
The term is natural monopoly. These are things which cannot have competition for practical reasons.

Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.

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fc417fc802 360 days ago
Neither is Fedex (see UPS, DHL, GSO, Amazon, the list goes on). We've still got USPS. What's your point?
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Workaccount2 359 days ago
USPS (and most government mail services) are to provide communication to every citizen. USPS delivers to every address in the US. So the government can send ballots, send census forms, send tax forms, etc. Sure you can use FedEx to send a parcel to remote Alaskan town, but if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).

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fc417fc802 358 days ago
Presumably a government operated email, video, or conferencing platform would also exist for the purpose of providing communication to every citizen, no? Again I ask what point you are trying to make here?

> 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.

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