Daniel Carpenter: evaluation

Transcript context

…Because the Postal Service was a kind of early internet. Remarkably cheap and fast by the standards of its time. Everyone had a voice. It was hard to censor. Yes. Look, there are whole sorts of folks you can talk to about net neutrality and its value. I would say that our political culture in the history of the United States, and much of our economy, and much of our education system presumed an open access, I mean, minimal cost for sending letters with all these cross-subsidies. The letters subsidized the newspapers, which was crucial because the newspaper created a much more informed society. It was a platform for advertising, things like that. I don’t want to make a simplistic mapping from that to, say, net neutrality because there are a whole bunch of other issues involved there. But I do think the degree to which providers can close off access or make access to this large externality much more costly is a grave concern. For what it’s worth, at some level, yes, we’re there with the internet now. At some level, it’s replaced the post office, but as I recently argued in the Boston Review, not entirely. There are still a large number of magazines, newspaper subscriptions for that matter now, pharmacy activities, and others that rely heavily upon the postal system and probably will for the foreseeable future. In the 19th century, how is the Postal Service central to the Progressive Reform Movement?…

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