Challenge: USPS charges for emails

With a POD after 1980, create a scenario where the USPS charges a fee (perhaps the letter price, perhaps less) for emails which go from one location to another. It's likely too late to install such a fee today, but when email was first getting started...

It would very likely be broken very quickly with email spoofing and so forth, but in a situation like this the government may try to get ahead of the people who try to game the system (major fines and stuff).

The fee would be based on the country in which the email originated.
 
With a POD after 1980, create a scenario where the USPS charges a fee (perhaps the letter price, perhaps less) for emails which go from one location to another. It's likely too late to install such a fee today, but when email was first getting started...

It would very likely be broken very quickly with email spoofing and so forth, but in a situation like this the government may try to get ahead of the people who try to game the system (major fines and stuff).

The fee would be based on the country in which the email originated.
First of all, you need USPS first to have a natural monopoly on internet, and them pushing it can trully charge the fee, if not, we could see Hotmail or gmail exploding early as they promise it for free.
 
First of all, you need USPS first to have a natural monopoly on internet, and them pushing it can trully charge the fee, if not, we could see Hotmail or gmail exploding early as they promise it for free.
They don't need a monopoly on the Internet, just IP ownership over sending of messages. Say a USPS research lab invents and patents the email, and a drunken judge decides in their favour in the subsequent litigation.

The decision would only cover US companies, so I imagine European and Asian companies will be the ones to set up the free email services.

Twenty years later American politicians are lamenting that but for that idiot judge that Google could be a US company...
 
nd a drunken judge decides in their favour in the subsequent litigation.
You need a very conservative/pro business court for that to happen, i remember the old thread when people discussed what if USPS pushed for email and internet adoption, the answers were interesting...to say the 'learn to code' would have whole new meaning with USPS and becoming the Public AOL...
Twenty years later American politicians are lamenting that but for that idiot judge that Google could be a US company...
Let me guess, they went to russia?
 

Mr. House

Banned
ATL Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot or at least they have a nuclear war before the late 1960s. The U.S. survives but during the reconstruction era goes fairly statist.

Computers still exist and when under civilian applications are under the control of the post-war USPS which is one of the most important rebuilding institutions on a federal level and also has services like a Federal Library System and Federal Banking for citizens.

By ATL 2019 as the civilian consumer economy is in full swing the weight of the post office is still large. They do neoliberal reforms so citizens can have personal computers instead of trekking to a post office or using their corporate ones but the deal is that the Postal Service gets an email tax.
 
ATL Cuban Missile Crisis goes hot or at least they have a nuclear war before the late 1960s. The U.S. survives but during the reconstruction era goes fairly statist.

Computers still exist and when under civilian applications are under the control of the post-war USPS which is one of the most important rebuilding institutions on a federal level and also has services like a Federal Library System and Federal Banking for citizens.
Unlikely to have a per-email cost, but just an overall access fee for all services, and you would be a number, not a name for your electronic address, with security by a hardware dongle at the local USPS office terminal, where you could print hardcopy, if you wished.

In the years to follow, infrastructure would be improved for home terminals by the late '80s
 

Mr. House

Banned
In the years to follow, infrastructure would be improved for home terminals by the late '80s
Do you think the consumer economy would have recovered that much by then? In my imaginations of a recovery from a War of 1962 the destruction of Western Europe and Japan always lead me to see larger segments of the economy focused on construction for instance wtihin the United States. Lots of Europeans and Japanese will need housing...again.
 
Do you think the consumer economy would have recovered that much by then? In my imaginations of a recovery from a War of 1962 the destruction of Western Europe and Japan always lead me to see larger segments of the economy focused on construction for instance wtihin the United States. Lots of Europeans and Japanese will need housing...again.

with 1962 WWIII, CONUS will be mostly untouched by Soviet Warheads, depending on what day in October things fire off. The main problem would be fallout from an wrecked W.Europe and annihilated USSR, Warsaw Pact and China

Decontamination of US farming and ranching areas would be the main focus for decades to come. Computer, even with WWIII, would be on track as the DEC PDP-1 was already in production, along with the earlier IBM AN/FSQ-7 that was the computer 'brains' behind the successful SAGE defence of North America.

Most everything that computers would be, were trailblazed by these two systems.

But yes, the US would step up with aid for what remained of Europe, and welcome Immigrants from there, so the consumer economy would still be there.
Going to the Moon would be out, but you would see the Military side of Gemini, with manned MOL stations keeping eyes on what had been China and the USSR until Satellites could take their place with the first Keyhole-11 spysats in the mid'70s, where they could downlink realtime info, rather than dropping film canisters as in the previous generations.
 
Why not have a subscription service package for email provision for companies and other regular users, and a "pay as you send" option otherwise?
 
Where there's a fee, there's a hack. Paywall, meet proxy server. Same here. People use VPNs to access Canadian email servers.
Depends on the cost.
When Long Distance was an expensive per minute charge, you had Phone Phreakers bypassing the charges. Today, most just pay their monthly cell bill.

Same for music. You had Napster and the rest, but now with iTunes and the low cost, most just 'buy' the music and movies.

In this ATL, you have a USPS Terminal rental fee, and most would just pay it, from the ease, as USPS is also the Bank.
 
I don't see how you could do this with a POD after 1980. Too much of the infrastructure has already been designed based on private circuits already being used for telegraph and long distance circuits. Judge Greene had already started the AT&T breakup by that point so I don't see how a monopoly for the USPS could be justified.
 
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