I'm unconvinced. I suggest that YT's outlay is a sneeze among the budget of the US. In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.

Most things are a sneeze compared to the budget of the federal government of the US, that doesn't mean that's a reasonable expectation for the US government (or any government) to run them.

Phone service is recognized as a public utility. What difference justifies the failure to label internet service as a public utility?

Most governments operate a postal service. Why then should governments not provide bare bones email and video services? You have government agencies using Zoom and similar. The analogy would be discontinuing the USPS and sending official government post via a wholly unregulated Fedex. It's absurd.

The term is natural monopoly. These are things which cannot have competition for practical reasons.

Zoom and email are not natural monopolies.

USPS (and most government mail services) are to provide communication to every citizen. USPS delivers to every address in the US. So the government can send ballots, send census forms, send tax forms, etc. Sure you can use FedEx to send a parcel to remote Alaskan town, but if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

USPS is not a natural monopoly, it's a government service that no one else wants to do (nor would they).

Presumably a government operated email, video, or conferencing platform would also exist for the purpose of providing communication to every citizen, no? Again I ask what point you are trying to make here?

> if you watch the tracking you'll see that they just hand off to USPS in Anchorage.

Because it's cheaper to do so. They can't offer a competitive rate because USPS is eating the cost in that case. To be clear I don't think that's a bad thing it just needs to be pointed out that if USPS didn't exist Fedex (or whoever) would deliver but would charge a much higher price to the person shipping the package.

You are the one who brought up natural monopolies and I'm not sure why. Private couriers exist yet the government still finds it worthwhile to run a public one. I asked why the same should not be true of digital communication platforms for email and video. Recall that the context of my original reply was a government operated youtube.

I challenge the idea that private enterprise could solve the scaling component better than a government could. We've reached this comedy of ads and surveillance capitalism because private strategies are flailing.

As a thought experiment, is it realistic to get every tax payer to pay for funny cat videos? Because that will be a reality in your non-capitalist utopia.

Or maybe there just won't be any cat videos, because the state has decreed them unnecessary or even harmful? How about political messages, is the state going to allow those to be posted on its platform? There are bound to be a few that go against state policy...

You could argue that the same is true for broadcast TV, and I would 100% agree. The state has no business running or even funding public television.

If it followed the USPS model there would be a retention fee for the uploader and a transfer fee for the downloader, both based on size. There would also likely be a stipulation that fees not dip below the actual costs incurred which would protect private entities that might wish to compete. (Such fee minimums can be seen with some municipal internet service regulations.)

> If it followed the USPS model there would be a retention fee for the uploader and a transfer fee for the downloader, both based on size.

The problem here is that we're already only having this debate because people refuse to pay, even when what they're paying with is functionally intangible (i.e. their letting an ad play on their PC for 30 seconds.

So any model which relies on people physically paying real actual money* is doomed to fail to begin with because you're not solving the issue.

I kind of but kind of don't agree. Arguably BigTech dumping free product is the only reason we ended up here. Of course the average consumer isn't going to pay if someone else offers the full featured product fee of charge.

There's also an issue with the payment model. Creating an account, sharing a bunch of personal info, and subscribing on a recurring basis is entirely different from the USPS model where I walk into the post office and pay a one time fee in cash to get my letter where it needs to go. I suppose an analogous service might charge $/gb/mo paid up front without requiring an account. Like catbox.moe except paid.

You're literally describing how content censorship already works on YouTube and Meta. Both companies curate content and have selective - opaque - policies about what gets boosted and what gets deboosted.

Also remember that legitimate creators keep being demonetised for no reason because AI moderation has a brainfart and no human is in charge.

And then there's the clusterfuck around malicious copyright strikes made for bad faith reasons by non-owners.

With public infrastructure there's at least some nominal possibility of democratic accountability - not so much in the US, large parts of which are pathologically delusional about public infrastructure as a concept, but it should be an option in countries with saner and more reality-based policies.

> why should US taxpayers subsidize a service for which non-US citizens could get a benefit from without paying any taxes?

Because US citizens would benefit? Preventing outsiders from incidentally benefiting isn't a constitutional mandate (yet).

Would you oppose an anti-pollution measure even though it would also provide cleaner air to neighbouring countries?

> In my estimation, all nations are lagging in the definition of what constitutes a public utility. In a decade we will be facepalming why advertisements were even needed for this common infrastructure.

I’m just glad others feel this way.

Why the hell can’t I have my own spam free email account from the post office? Because the ads, the precious ads.