Re:The Public Interest Internet, by Robin Berjon
by troyvit on Monday July 01, 2024 @07:03PM
(#40851771)
It took me like 12 days to read the whole article, so, this comment is super late but someday maybe you'll run across it. All I want to say is that's a great idea. Back when email started entering wide use I was flummoxed as to why the post office didn't offer its own email options.
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Re:The Public Interest Internet, by Robin Berjon
by ETH_start on Tuesday July 02, 2024 @02:42PM
(#40859336)
Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this, and it may have had definite merit — like ensuring services that are naturally monopolistic due to network effects, are provided by an entity collectively controlled by the public — but an email service wouldn't fit the economic definition of a public good.
An open source codebase allowing anyone to set up their own mail server would be the public good in that domain.
A table that gives examples of private vs public goods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_excl...
Public goods:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)
For more complex goods, involving management of platforms, I think the only type of public good that could compete with proprietary offerings is the software that allows people to form a decentralized consensus and run applications on top of it, e.g. blockchain node software and smart contract code, respectively.