In this day and age email is basically a necessity. To use any online service (and increasingly common for offline ones) an email address is required at the minimum.<p>Currently those are provided by private corporations. But will, or even should, governments step in and offer this service to their citizens just like with regular mail?<p>Came to this idea thinking about the development of the postal service and immediately thought of it as a natural continuation/evolution, but the more I think the more gotchas I see with it. Like what to use as the email identifier (people change names and places, random number are hard to remember, etc), how to stop bad actors from spamming everyone, what if someone uses it to send objectionable content, etc.
SNOWDEN ALERT: It'd be yet another great excuse for the government to spy on their citizens. It's not all bad... for those that don't really care and aren't breaking any laws, and "don't care about privacy", they might be fine with it, as most of us are when we hop on to any social media account we use.
If a government wants citizen to fill out forms online in a mandatory fashion, I think they have to provide free access to internet and email.<p>The current state where they tell you "to use the internet connection of a friend" when you don't have internet is kind of ridiculous, especially for migrating people from foreign countries that are overwhelmed by European bureaucracies.<p>You should try getting an internet contract when you don't already own a smartphone. It's impossible, because all ISPs require some form of web identification with shitty apps and your passport that's being recorded.<p>In Germany we had the "de-mail" for a while with exactly that purpose. But in a government fashion they ridiculously fucked it up, using a proprietary encryption and signing mechanism that never worked up until the point that de-mails were blocked everywhere and all "licensed" providers of that stopped servicing it.
Yes, along with social media platforms. At least in the USA, to protect free speech, press, assembly, association, and the host of rights no enumerated, but retained.<p>The US government, in my mind and in practice, appears to need 3rd party providers so they can subvert the 4th Amendment under the auspices of "free market activity" in such they just buy peoples activity data where they would have once needed a warrant, or would need one on a government provided platform. Plus, if you aren't a US citizen/greencard holder, you shouldn't be labelled as such as a means of reducing propaganda and conflating worldviews with American views.
Yes, and/or social media, as an evolution towards a citizen dashboard. I used to think federated media (Diaspora was my choice at the time) is a natural e-community centre: joining a local interest-based hub for day-to-day use that can nevertheless serve as a node for broader discussions. Just like voting down at the rec centre.<p>Government "spying" is a hard but not unsolvable problem, rooted in our own values. We're so culturally punch-drunk we've no hope on making progress right now. Maybe when the wind changes again...<p>I don't mind private corp. email, as long as it doesn't capture anything. Basic communication seems such a no-brainer that speculating to make it available to the market seems superfluous.
Not a government-run regular e-mail system, but in Germany there's "De-Mail": <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/De-Mail</a><p>It's not interoperable with the regular email system (can't communicate with GMail addresses etc), and it's not fully run by the government but by accredited partners. It's meant for sending legal documents across De-Mail users like government agencies and businesses.<p>But it's barely used.
> Came to this idea thinking about the development of the postal service and immediately thought of it as a natural continuation/evolution<p>In Denmark there is a system called Digital Post for communication with public authorities, mostly used for receiving relevant notifications/updates/documents.
I think that the gov absolutely should do it but I also believe that it should allow people to configure their @something.gov email addresses as redirects so as to minimize the amount of information stored on gov servers.
Internet providers usually offer a free email associated with the internet plan (at least in Italy) which is the closest thing to a government provided email.
i like this idea where the government is allowed to oversee your email and that email is only allowed for government stuff(taxes etc) and communication with your gov representatives etc.