Posted by hackerbeat 2 days ago
Under law: DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring). But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.
Under government contract: DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.
Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service. The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"
> citing a 90% decline in letter mail since 2000
Even the government themselves went full digital... Personally I think that if people think post services are a national priority it should be subsidised with tax money. Cannot expect a private company to burn money.
Which is funny because parcel delivery has only grown over the last decade while Canada Post loses more and more money, while their union workers are demanding pay raises and job security.
Why doesn't the government just make the strikes illegal?
Sad to see civilizational damages caused by neoliberalism, even in such countries as Denmark.
EU governments are cutting costs everywhere, this is the end result of recession-era policies.
Of course it could also be due to mismanagement. If Amazon is allowed to subcontract its own delivery people, and somehow that's profitable, public post companies might find ways to stay relevant.
But let's not forget that network and electricity are not given once and for all. We may end up experiencing quite long periods without them. Country that would get rid of related infra and know-how would be helpless.
When a society becomes fully efficient, people start craving the slow, the physical, the intentional.
If your phone gets stolen, meanwhile, you may find yourself unable to log into the police's portal for reporting it.
I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
However it's one-way only at the moment, there's no way to use it for two-way communication.
I think that companies providing certain basic services like email or messaging should eventually become branches of the government. This is the only way to provide these services with subsidies without enshittification.
They could rely on providing banking services via shoddy software, and prosecute people, and hound them to death rather than face up as to how crap their software is, until someone makes a TV mini series about it to highlight the issue.
I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.
> Danes will still be able to send letters, using the delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark but will expand its services from 1 January from about 30m letters in 2025 to 80m next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao shop to post their letters – or pay extra to have it collected from home – and pay for postage either online or via an app.
If they have a state sanctioned monopoly you legally just can't.
n 1844, hearing from citizens from every party and under pressure to reform the postal system, Washington lawmakers and the Postmaster General had no intention of sitting still for any of "that Spooner's shenanigans." Suits against Spooner and his cohorts began. Railroad heads were given full warning that contracts for government mails would be removed and fines imposed unless space and passage were refused to private letter carriers. It was "round one" for the government when an agent of Spooner's company in Baltimore was found guilty and fined for transporting letters in a railroad car over a post road of the United States. Spooner himself was arrested in New York on March 7 on three charges by special agents of the Post Office. Another of his agents, Calvin Case, was held to bail for $100 around March 23 for carrying letters on the train.
No cash?
PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed.
The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.
I doubt this will end well, but Denmark is a small country so maybe it will work.
After a year it would be nice to see stats and compare delivery time, lost mail, cost between Dao and the old service,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord?wprov=sfti1#
It is still the 2nd largest company in Sweden. They just gave up on Denmarks mail contract after the vast majority of people stopped sending mail and now another company is taking over the much smaller operation.
They shall do it like in the energy sector: one company who takes it from the sender, one to transport it and one to deluver it to the receiver. /s
The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract.
EDIT: maybe Royal Mail was never the Danish term, but I thought it was on a Lego set too...