Don't Lick that Stamp . . .

[Corjomc]

What if the U.S. Postal Service decided to provide an E-Mail for every citizen, Ie. JohnSmith2468@USPS.USA.

As a follow up they set about using telephone poles as wifi hotspots across the country?

Basically someone at the post office early on goes "E-Mail? Hmmmmm, Mail . . ., Wait! That's Us!"

Not wishing to become dinosaurs or the equivelant of Telephone booths the organizzation dives in to the on-line world.

When would such a program be feeasibble to begin?

Who would be in favor of it? Who would try to stop it?

Effects on the World?

What other countries would follow suit?

Perhaps Gore wins in 2000 and after being laughed at for 'inventing the internet' decides to run with it.

 

[overoceans]

Who would be in favor of it? Who would try to stop it?

I wonder what their unions would think of this. I remember during the first decade of the internet, Canada Post running ads encouraging people to send old-school letters, obviously because they were probably losing business to e-mail. I'm guessing their workers would have been concerned as well, even if they had contractual job-security protecting their jobs.

Not sure what kind of job-security US postal workers have. Or how many of them could be moved over to the new e-mail department in the event of their services no longer being required for paper mail.

 

[overoceans]

Also...

What if the U.S. Postal Service decided to provide an E-Mail for every citizen, Ie. JohnSmith2468@USPS.USA.

I'm not sure how feasible the universal aspect of this would be. Do you mean that, whether you want it or not, the postal service sends you a notice informing you that you now have an e=mail account, and here's your addrees?

I guess they'd just get the names from Social Security, create the accounts, and mail them out? That could possibly work.

In the early days, opposition would probably be a coalition of fiscal hawks, who don't accept the idea that e-mail will ever be important enough to justify the expenditure; privacy advocates, who'd worry that having e-mail being state-run would make it easier for the authorities to spy on you; and maybe just anti-government types who don't want government departments to expand. I suspect you'd also see opposition from courier companies and whatnot, who are already helpless to deal with hotmail and yahoo, and now the government is using their own tax dollars to compete against them.

 

[Corjomc]

Would there be that much drop off in the real world work the Post Office would do in this world? Probably some just because they would be pushing E-mail.

In a weird parallel some of the postal workers are in the same boat as coal workers today. The whole 'Learn to Code' thing comes to mind but being more applicable to the USPS employees that could go from superfluous to evolving along with the organization.

Yes, people would be assigned an E-mail.

On the Pro side would be Environmentalists saying how going paperless saves the environment, fights global warming, etc.

Big Paper in the U.S. will fight this.

Could AOL. Yahoo, and the others be co-opted into the system?

 

[overoceans]

Yes, people would be assigned an E-mail.

Out of curiousity, I wonder how many numbers you'd have to add to "JohnSmith" to account for everyone in the country with that name? I think it would go a considerable bit beyond 2468(as per your example), though even a six digit number would probably be doable.

I suppose they could just use postal codes, but then, that would get into privacy issues, people not wanting receivers to know their location.

As for Big Paper, they might fight it at the beginning, but as time goes by, it'll become obvious that the triimph of cyber over paper was inevitable anyway, with or without government involvement(e-mail is probably on the decline the last decade or so of OTL, but that doesn't mean people are going back to paper, more like cell phones and apps).

Though I wonder if a cultural-economic mythology could develop, wherein e-mail gets identified as specifically a government thing, and paper companies are going bankrupt and workers being tossed out of jobs because of evil Uncle Sam making their services redundant. Of course, the same thing would happen with a private-sector dominated e-mail market, but since most people don't do Alternate History, they won't consider that possible timeline. (Like people who think kids are immersed in porn culture because of sex-ed in public schools, as if the private-sector internet would be a puritan colony if only schools would stop pushing Heather Has Two Mommies.)

 

[sprite]

After an initial dip, the post office switches to package delivery and charges companies a minimal amount to send bills and invoices to their email addresses.

 

[Corjomc]

A big question that comes up is when the police want to read your messages and they are technically the property of the USPS. The lawyers line up on both sides for this one.

What rights and safeguards does a citizen have in this system?

Can they de-platform you if its a public service?

 

[Histor32]

A big question that comes up is when the police want to read your messages and they are technically the property of the USPS. The lawyers line up on both sides for this one.

What rights and safeguards does a citizen have in this system?

Can they de-platform you if its a public service?

Also do they prohibit the use of other email services.. If so.. Usps just lost, its all or nothing for them