An Argument for Public Internet Through the US Postal Service
The Congress shall have Power ... To establish Post Offices and post Roads;
What is a “road”?
More precisely, what is a “post road”?
The Postal Clause has been debated repeatedly throughout US history, but generally “roads” have been assumed to mean “open ways for vehicles, persons, and animals,” with a “post road” simply being one such road for use by the postal service.
In the era of the internet it's worth revisiting this assumption.
The founders almost certainly lacked any other word than “road” to denote what they had in mind when developing the Constitution. The Constitution was developed before the emergence of anything that might be recognizable as a computer, arguably by over a hundred years, and certainly before the advent of networked computers. Many functions of a “postal road” that now are commonly found in the internet were ascribed only to “an open way for vehicles and persons” as recently as 30 years ago. As such, it's important to consider whether the term “road”, and certainly “postal road”, should be interpreted more broadly in the context of the Postal Clause to retain its original scope of meaning.
Writings from the time of the Constitution make it clear that its authors envisioned the US Postal Service to function largely the same as the modern internet. Early summaries of House debates in 1791 note
That clause of the Constitution which empowers the Federal Government to establish post offices and post roads, cannot, it was said, be understood to extend farther than the conveyance of intelligence, which is the proper object of the Post Office establishment. It gives no power to send men and baggage by post.
How to specify that the Post Office was to convey intelligence, but not persons, was a major theme of debate among drafters of the Constitution and Postal Act of 1792. Had the internet been available at the time, the drafters would almost certainly have specified it should be included. They simply lacked any broader concept of how “a regular system of free and speedy communication” might be obtained, outside of the transportation methods of the time. “Diffusion of Intelligence and useful Information” were inextricably linked with conveyance of persons at that moment.
The Founders did discuss means of conveyance other than over land, and it also points to a more general interpretation of “post roads” than “ways for vehicles, persons, and animals.” Canals were the other primary means of domestic transportation — railroads were not established yet — and figured prominently in early discussions of the US postal system. At the time, canals were extremely controversial due to their expense and the financial power they would afford to those who would control it. An extensive, federal canal was not seen as something ubiquitous like roads, and in fact publicly financed canals had not yet been developed, the Erie Canal not appearing for at least two more decades. Discussions of canals raised concerns that it would be too tempting to expand them to passenger and other nonpostal service, and that they would unfairly benefit those states in which they were established.
Even with these concerns, language was used to leave open the possibility of postal canals. As Winifred Gallagher notes, the Post Office Act of 1792 avoided the controversy by using the vague term “routes” rather than “roads” to enable delivery of mail by whatever means necessary. The Act specifically establishes the position of a Postmaster General, and empowers them to “direct the route or road, where there are more than one, between the places [established by Congress in the Act], which route or road shall be considered the post road.” This last clause seems to definitively establish that the Founders had a broad view of what a post “route or road” means, but if there were any doubt, they underscore it later in the act by discussing fines for uncooperative ferrymen.
A final argument for a broad interpretation of “post road” to include the internet and other means of communication can be found in the language itself. It would be disingenous, for instance, to deny that email is so named because it is what it is called: electronic mail. If one of the original uses of the internet, predating the web, is to convey electronic mail, and one of the purposes of the US Postal Service is to convey mail, a logical conclusion is that the internet is its appropriate domain.
What might be less obvious is that the term “road” may have had a broader meaning at the time of the Constitution's drafting than what we currently ascribe to it. As has been noted by lexicographers and linguists, the modern meaning of the term “road” is relatively recent. Prior to about 250 years ago — around the time of the founding of the United States — the term started to acquire its current meaning. Prior to this time, what we now refer to as a physical road was often denoted by the term “way”, and “road” meant something closer to the current term “route” or “way”, as in “the road to recovery.” It's not an exaggeration to say that “road” and “way” exchanged meanings sometime shortly before the founding of the United States. It's impossible to know for sure, but it is reasonable to argue that, in this context, the Founders may have had a more general interpretation of the term than we now might intuitively assume. Specifying a “route or road” as in the Post Office Act of 1792 might have involved a distinction less meaningful to the Founders than it is to us, or may have been a way of correcting an emerging misinterpretation.
The idea of public internet access being offered through the USPS might be seen as naive, especially in the current political and economic climate. The USPS has long been a consistent target of criticism from certain political communities, including the current presidential administration, and current budgetary concerns mitigate against the idea of a significant increase in USPS services. Most importantly, it might seem detached to raise such issues at a time fraught with civil rights and public health concerns.
At the same time, the pandemic has revealed the critical need for internet access in modern society, and how inequities in it fuel societal injustice. As the founders correctly foresaw, internet access is no longer a luxury, but a necessary component of society's infrastructure in maintaining productive employment, communication, and services. One of the only things worse than the current pandemic would be the current pandemic without the internet; one of the best ways to fight injustice is to secure equal access to information and infrastructure.
At the same time these discussions about public ISPs are occuring, the public health need for such services is becoming apparent in other ways. For example, in response to the coronavirus pandemic, a group of attorney generals from 31 states, three U.S. territories, and the District of Columbia recently sent a letter to the US House and Senate imploring legislators to increase funding for broadband access. Similarly, the Minnesota legislature recently drafted legislation to address broadband needs in the wake of the pandemic, and Idaho approved a program to address longstanding information access needs that the pandemic has brutally exposed.
Although the Minnesota bills are relatively vague in their language, the Idaho program stipulates that improved broadband capacity must be provided through private ISPs, and grants cannot be used to establish public options. This raises a significant question: why, if broadband is clearly essential infrastructure, should public taxpayer funds be used to exclusively support private provision of those services? Why not offer such services through public infrastructure, as municipalities and states such as Vermont have proposed? To take this a step further, why not make it a comprehensive, national goal to provide broadband access to citizens? As discussions have moved from the city or county level to state level, it seems the next natural question is how to offer public internet at the federal level. The USPS provides a means of doing so.