I think this is a better answer than it first appears.

Initiatives at for profit corporations will always exist within some business constraints, shareholder obligations, and so forth.

It would be very reasonable for governments to provide tax-supported digital services. I could easily imagine that spending a few dollars per year to provide the homeless with basic digital services would pay off simply in easing administrative overhead.

But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of what government can or should provide is atrophied, and we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic public services.

>But we don't do it, because, in America, our sense of what government can or should provide is atrophied, and we, mistakenly, look to private actors to provide basic public services.

I don't think this matches reality. The US government is doing more today than any time point in the past. Spending and taxation as a percent of dgp is at an all time high.

There's also a sense that nobody should have to do anything themselves. There's nothing stopping anyone from talking to a homeless person and helping them set up an email account without 2fa.

That's fair that I shouldn't make such an unqualified statement.

While public spending as a % of GDP has indeed increased, that's primarily driven by two things: increased defence (and related) spending, and increased spending on health costs.

In the US, the growth in social assistance spending over the last 3 decades is driven almost entirely by the latter: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-expenditure-as-per....

At the same time, we continue to believe in privatizing basic government services: outsourcing social assistance to charities (including religious charities), outsourcing military and intelligence functions to mercenaries, or, on point for this thread, outsourcing ID verification to VC-funded private startups.

Looking at your numbers or just social spending, it is increased 50% since 1990 as a portion of GDP. Real GDP adjusted for inflation itself has increased more than 3x since 1990. This means that us social spending in terms of inflation adjusted purchases has gone up more than 450% from 1990 levels.

This excludes military spending and is adjusted for the purchasing power of those dollars.

I don't know about you, but I don't feel like we are getting 450% more value out of the government services. The numbers are pretty clear that the government is collecting more and more inflation adjusted dollars from people's income than ever before.

I Suspect we would probably agree that the government is not being a responsible steward of this money that it is collecting.

My primary point was that I don't think that the belief that a decrease in government spending and Revenue is reflected in the numbers. Further, I think it is important to push back on the idea that the systemic issues we see can simply be solved by throwing more money into an increasingly inefficient system.

Sure. My point was indeed to suggest we rethink what government can do.

Can governments (not necessarily the federal government) run a public service internet system? Sure, and probably more easily than we can, as another poster suggested, regulate tech companies into providing the right tradeoffs for housed and unhoused users.

I've been on municipal Broadband and it was fine. I ended up moving to a private provider because it was better and cheaper.

When it comes to the right trade-off for the housed and the unhoused in terms of email service, I'm skeptical that the solution is regulatory. It seems like there is a large number of email providers that already offer what the homeless need. The problem is simply setting them up with the correct provider and user settings.

This seems like a job for people that work with the homeless.

Sure. I was also saying the solution is not regulatory.

But, look at that: the federal government already provides the homeless with cell phones. Yet instead of arguing that the government should also provide free email—which of course costs far less than cell service—the poster argues that existing commercial services should better serve the homeless.

Which, of course, would be nice! But my point was that this kind of argument seems to reflect a mistaken perception of free online services as some sort of social service, with commensurate obligations.

I see, I think I read in haste and missed your position on regulating tech into somehow solving the problem.

It seems like we basically agree.

> Which is okay, because it is a business.

It might be legal and maybe even legitimate, but OP said:

> This isn't a "fuck the people who don't have regular access to a phone, they don't matter" situation.

So yeah, those people don't matter (enough) in the sense that it's not worth to offer more methods of 2FA. Let's not pretend otherwise.

Am I pretending otherwise? Obviously businesses value certain people more than others. It is a business.

Not you, but the OP certainly gives this vibe.

I find your worldview overly constrains the range of possibilities and eliminates reasonable ones, like expecting companies to not disproportionately harm those in our society who are least able to recover from or avoid the harm

Businesses are not harming anyone by not providing charity.

I struggle to see a reasonable possibility to the government either directly or legislating others to provide identification and communications services. One of the greatest utilities in the US is USPS, a monumental accomplishment to be able to provide communications to all people in the US.

Tacking on email (and identity verification services - which USPS already does via passports) should be a no brainer.

IMO it became plainly a good idea to have the US Post Office provide email service no later than a decade ago.