Has it occurred to anyone else that our Post Office, lately a money loser, needs some fundamental rethinking?
Rather than stop Saturday delivery or just raise the cost of a stamp, why not really think about what this organization should be doing long term.
America currently has among the lowest internet access speeds in the civilized world. Especially in more rural areas, there simply isn’t anything other than dialup. And won’t be.
So: gradually re-purpose the Post Office over the next 5 to 10 years. They’re already nationwide and maintain offices in every (or nearly every) zip code. Perfect. Make it such that any citizen can contract with them for internet access and email (and a permanent, personalized domain along the lines of lemkin.po.box or somesuch; yes, this means the government takeover of a new TLD: Shock, horror.). Price access rates inversely to market availability. It would cost more to buy PO.Box domains in, say, Manhattan, NY than in Manhattan, KS, based entirely on existing availability and a given market’s existing broadband penetration. This keeps the government from taking over broadband.
And, obviously, the Post Office itself wouldn’t run out there and start laying fiber, they’d more likely sub-contract somebody else to go do it; the real role of the PO here would be to write down some or all of the initial costs in exchange for longer-term cost recovery than any private firm can safely undertake. Structured properly, companies like Google would have a vested interest in seeing to it that such a nationwide project can be done quickly and as cheaply as possible. And would likely put some of their own effort behind it. This also has the knock-on benefit of requiring a lot of infrastructure investment and, more importantly, it creates a lot of jobs that are entirely or nearly entirely created through the private sector.
The point is: lack of broadband access in this country is a real and still developing crisis. We have a large operation tasked with enabling equal access to communication. So let them do that.
Lemkin 