> Nation states absolutely should provide and host, e-mail accounts for their citizens

Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers? IRL this would cost billions and everyone under 60 would forward their gov’t mail to gmail.

>Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers?

The largest transfer of public property into the hands of private enterprise in human history was the Internet. At that time it was wild and limitless and full of promise. It’s pretty much stagnated from there.

Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societal benefit when done at public universities on the taxpayer’s dime.

Inventing and turning into usable product are not the same skill sets, nor is maintaining. If, today, you survey which websites are the most robust, the most user friendly, the most performant, the most functional, or most economical, you are very unlikely to settle on one produced and maintained by the government, or even a university. I've noticed in recent years that some government websites have actually become fairly usable, but I would not say I've ever been impressed by one.

Also, maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems very strange to say they internet was transferred to private enterprise. Private enterprise built on a government foundation, but almost everything that people use the internet for now was built by private enterprise, and the standards which constitute the most important contribution of the government were not, and are not now, under corporate ownership.

The public internet backbone (NSFNET 41) was officially decommissioned on 30 April 1995. This essentially marks the birth of today’s commercial internet.

The ground was set by the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act on October 2, 1992. This passed Congress with almost no debate. However, there were innovative politicians who attempted to allocate a certain amount of bandwidth for a public right-of-way.

The United States has very little publicly-owned internet infrastructure and few advanced digital public services. The USA also happens to lag behind other nations in simple metrics like the speed that ISPs deliver. Maybe it's a coincidence that many of these nations have more robust public services.

> Just like scientific and medical research, tech research is the most effective and has the largest societal benefit when done at public universities on the taxpayer’s dime.

counter-example: Bell Labs.

Was that entirely private? I thought Bell Labs was getting operating budget from Western Electric, which while also private, as I recall, was getting massive investment from the US government to develop infrastructure across the USA? And then wasn't there also DARPA funding? Also, they seemed unaggressive with their patents, licensing tons of them quite freely.

Also, is it good that Bell labs was the way it was? Americans seem to have quite a hard go with telecom, maybe not as bad as some countries, but from what I can see the country is riddled with regional functional monopolies, gaps in service, high prices for rural areas, and bad behavior regarding net neutrality on the part of ISPs. Perhaps the situation wouldn't be so bad if the USA had nationalized, or at least partially nationalized, its phone and internet systems?

Actually in Brazil the government has been providing tax-filling software for the last 20 years, and for its purposes it is quite good. If you just get a wage and don’t do anything too complex in your financial life like flipping houses, owning multiple companies, filling your yearly tax returns is a 10 to 20 minutes affair.

Also, the instant payments network that you can use to send money from any bank to any bank in seconds from your cell phone, the PIX, is government software.

Also, I am a small company owner and I can access a lot of government web applications online using a SSO with my optional digital certificate, or I can login into them by using my banks identity services as an oauth provider. No SMS funky business.

If anything, it is the private banks, that while in my experience have far better software than American banks, that is behind. I, for one can use the same digital certificate that I use for fiscal purposes to access my vaccination certificates, but I can’t use yet on most banks.

Of course there is a lot of government software that is basically enterprise software, bad software, but a lot of it, and usually the ones that I need to use more frequently are pretty good. They may not follow the latest flat design fashions, but they are accessible, ease to use, responsive, safe and fit for their purposes. And mind you, we are talking about Brasil, not exactly a model of good governance.

> Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers?

Well, actually - yes? My country has lots of problems, but government-issued software is surprisingly good. I would have trust issues however after it came up, that they used Pegasus very liberally.

Which country is that?

Guessing by the mention of Pegasus I guess they might have meant Poland.

That's correct

They might be forwarding their mail to Gmail but at least they can easily switch from Gmail to an alternative and theie identity isn't locked to using Google services this way.

Not perfect, but better than what we have today.

DARPA was responsible for a few things you may have heard of.

Much of the world already relies on nation-states for message delivery through the post office.

Because everyone utilises such systems, everyone has a vested interest in the privacy of such systems. Under liberal democratic governments, protections for privacy, security, and integrity are typically quite strong. Not inviolable, and you'll likewise find a significant set of criminal laws for crimes transacted utilising postal systems (mail and wire fraud, etc.), but specified and typically balanced.

Mind: that emerged over time, and a significant early interest of governements in operating messaging services was of course message intercepts.

That said, the early history of telegraphic and telephonic communications (both often privately owned and operated) is hardly much better. See the case of AT&T and the Republican Party swinging presidential elections, as told in Tim Wu's The Master Switch.

Counterpoint.

Gov.uk

> Because nation states are well known for producing usable software at a reasonable cost to tax payers?

Yes, they are. The software, hardware, and automated systems underlying transit systems in Japan, Taiwan, some of the UK, and a couple other countries, continues to make trains not crash into eachother for just about a hundred years now depending on the system. I don't know too much about it, but it seems the same to be true for whatever runs the stoplights around town.

It's not always nationalized, but the software used to plan trash pickups and routes, bus routes, bus signage, sewer planning and control, shipyard signaling, and numerous other public works is at least tangentially taxpayer funded and government organized. Those seem to work pretty swell considering their level of complexity (at least in the countries I've lived in).

Here in Taiwan the government websites can be notoriously terrible, but some are really fantastic, for example https://data.gov.tw . There's also strict requirements for accessibility that are rigidly enforced, which is a nice thing you don't often get from private software (you have to depend on a disabled person suing a site before it'll be made accessible in the USA - abled people don't have "standing" it seems).

Honestly, it sounds like you're making a very generalized libertarian argument, and I don't want to risk a politics flamewar, but I'm really not sure what alternative you're offering for governments building software, that doesn't involve total dissolution of the government. The department of motor vehicles needs a website one way or the other, they're either going to build it in house or pay contractors to do it, either way, taxpayers are paying for the website, and any additional app-like online services.

Was there some specific examples you had of unusable software or unreasonably priced software that would justify such an extreme solution? Cause the dichotomy to me seems false: surely there are ways to improve the quality or reduce the cost of taxpayer funded software, if necessary? Surely that's easier than... whatever it is you're suggesting?

edit: Some other good examples of nation-state provided software in Taiwan, there was some fantastic contact tracing apps and backends implemented by the government. The UI was admittedly quite.. sparse, but it was undeniably functional and accessible. And, it came with strong guarantees about data anonymity, which you can never trust from a private company.

edit: I'm clicking through some various USA websites now and these all seem just fine to me. I guess the accusation is that they took too much money to develop? https://www.congress.gov https://www.vaccines.gov/ https://www.cdc.gov https://www.hhs.gov/

seems the same to me for the UK although their cookie banners are hilariously absurd https://www.nhs.uk/ https://www.gov.uk/

Mostly static websites that just serve out data are fairly easy to produce and maintain, especially when they are relatively low traffic. I won't attempt to evaluate Taiwan's websites (although your own qualifications tend to support OPs claims) but those US websites are mostly just publishing information. They don't demonstrate the government is capable of providing quality email to all citizens because they don't demonstrate the ability to operate at high scale with high reliability and adequate performance while delivering highly personalized pages.

The only example I can think of for the US government attempting to offer something like that at scale was the notorious healthcare marketplace created for the ACA. It catastrophically failed at launch, took months to fix, and the people who fixed it were people who left private industry to do so for philanthropic reasons. If you read the story of how it came to be in that state, it's pretty much what you'd expect. Lots of different departments arguing, contractors coming and going, tons of coordinating meetings, budget overruns, finger pointing. This despite this being a crucial piece of infrastructure for the biggest health care reform in years. That pretty much set my expectations for how good at software the federal government is, but I'm open to hearing proper counterexamples if you can supply one.

Everyone deserves an e-mail that can't be taken away from them without a court order.

Sadly the vast majority won't realize they not only deserve it, but need it, until it's too late.

The best time to use a custom domain name under your control for personal email was when you first started corresponding via email. The second best time is now.

And a phone number, and a bank account/CC number (so that you won't get escalatingly locked out of stuff because your direct debits fail. Don't ever use N26, kids.)

But N26 is (allegedly) the only bank you can use without your government paperwork proving you live at an address which you have to rent using your bank account.

Regarding nation states, this sounds like a wet dream of any govt. to be able to centrally mine your email data :facepalm.

I know the NSA can probably do it but at least it’s somewhat gated to that intelligence community. Opening it up further is a recipe for disaster.

The point is that since so many services require email it's getting to the point that not having an email is a major hurdle, and therefore government must recognize it as being part of critical infrastructure and provide this service, just as they do with USPS. IRS (US govt tax authority) requires email account to register and pay taxes. So that the state government, and the county where I live as well. My kids school requires email to register kids for school and for their many educational systems; so does their pediatrician office. Bank accounts require email. The list goes on. All of these cannot and should not be anonymous and I do not have any problems with using government-provided email provider to use these.

I do want to have an option to use other emails for my streaming accounts, shopping, and all the other stuff, so that I'm not required to use the same email address everywhere. I can rent my own domain name and use the email service tied top that.

That'd work for me.

And I _too_ run my own email server on my own domain. Though it resides on a dedicated server that I own in a data center somewhere in the Mid-West. The web mail cient it has is kind of crap though. I run a secondary "mail server" in my home, with a better webmail client, and is also configured with better spam protection and syncs with my android phone and outlook on my laptop, and that local email server that is configured to retrieve email from the data center server, along with retrieving email from gmail and a few other old email systems that I still have access too. Controlling my own email server, and my online identity that goes with it, is far better than entrusting it to someone like Google (who got about one step away from cancelling my Google account when they lost a phone I returned for repair, but that's a different story).

Interestingly, running my own server in a data center lets me run a permanent, private VPN from my home network to the data center, effectively hiding me away from any monitoring from my cable provider, using the DNS I want to make use of, blocking traffic I don't want leaking out or coming in. I have a smaller, less capable server in the UK also running a permanent, private VPN. Depending on which WiFi SSID I connect to within my home, determines if I appear as being in the US or the UK, which gives me access to different streaming services, different streaming content, different website experiences, etc.

You could always use a service like Mailgun to work around problems like that. It could help with IP/network reputation problems, too. I think that’s a reasonable option if it enables running a mail server at home.

In my experience (from a few years ago) Mailgun had terrible deliverability to Microsoft and Yahoo. There would be long periods where those providers would return nothing but anti-spam errors, based on Mailgun's own logs.

This kind of exists in Norway in the sense that we have at least two systems for communicating with government offices and, to some degree other organizations and people (haven't quite figured that out). This isn't an email solution as such though.

The thing is, all of these solutions are much maligned - despite being a lot better than what we had before (send/receive paper). If the state were to offer email accounts, people would complain about how bad they were (whether true or not) and argue that we should "let the market sort it out".

Which brings us to where we are now. With the market "sorting it out".

What can work really well, is to rent the cheapest, smallest VPS you can find.

Then redirect the SMTP port with a VPN to your local server, which can be anywhere in the world. You can run IMAP the same way if you want to.

Personally, I'm fully capable of doing that, but even then, it's all entirely dependent on the graces of random VPS providers, it's another route I'd rather not go, I already find it repugnant that the Internet service itself is in the hands of private entities which are under no obligation to provide any specific quality of service (not an enforceable one anyway, as I cannot really chose whose running the actual network fabric, even if I can chose which "company" I pay the bill to). Geez, if water and power delivery was as unregulated as Internet delivery, we'd be like "well, it's mostly AC, maybe DC offset a few thousand volts, on sundays it's 10 hz slower, and it's somewhere in the range of 100 and 500 volts" "Yeah, this is what we call water.. No, we don't support Hydrogen molecules, they're dangerous you see."

On top of that, most people don't care (don't know why they should) and don't have the ability to host this infrastructure themselves, and frankly, they shouldn't have to either..

I find RackNerd suits me just well. They are a great provider. I found them on Low End Boxes. I pay $25 a year. The only thing I ran into was the IP that was assigned was in one blacklist. It was one of the notoriously overzealous blacklists that hate everyone, though it was simple enough to request removal. No problems since.

Also a happy customer of racknerd but beware the owner has a dubious history in the hosting business and is currently undergoing related criminal proceedings https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/180381/some-juicy-court-dr...

This link is login-walled.

Of-course even with end to end encryption, the amount of meta data available to the government in this configuration would be a systematic risk to democracy.