This is one of the most disingenuous articles I've read in a while. I expected something a bit more subtle from a Yale alumnus.

They believed that their technology could actually save the Post Office money. If consumers started to opt-in to Outbox, or other services like Outbox, then the Post Office could receive the full benefits of the stamped envelope but never have to deliver those packages, which is one of the biggest costs for the Post Office. In fact, if properly implemented, when a customer sends a letter from Austin, TX to Alaska, if the Post Office knew that they weren’t going to receive the letter anyway, then the Post Office could forward the letter from Austin directly to Outbox, and never have to ship the letter across the continent.

This, for example, is just laughably wrong. Marginal cost isn't the bugbear of the USPS; universal service obligations are. As long as there's one person in Alaska who doesn't want to sign up for digital mail (possibly because they can't reliably connect to it in Alaska), then the USPS has to fly planes or sail boats up there to deliver the mail anyway. And as Outbox themselves discovered, moving mail around for individual customers is hideously expensive. It can be made efficient in cities where there is sufficient population density, but something like 1/3 of US addresses are on rural routes and of course delivery to those is more expensive. Even if half the customers on rural routes sign up for a service like Outbox, there's no promise that they'll be the ones farthest away from sorting offices, so mail carriers will need to travel more or less the same routes even if they are serving a lower number of customers, plus all customers will want packages delivered because packages have physical rather than purely informational content. Unfortunately, the profit margin on Package elivery is only about 1/3 that of first class mail delivery, which continues to decline in volume at about the same rate that demand for package delivery increases, leaving the USPS in a now-in situation which requires it to balance the books through cuts rather than investment and growth for the foreseeable future: http://about.usps.com/strategic-planning/five-year-business-...

I loathe junk mail with a passion and it really irritates me that I have no way to opt out from it, that the USPS is required to inefficiently front-load all its fiscal obligations as if they were payable tomorrow, and a whole bunch of other things. But by ignoring the legal operating constraints imposed by Congress on the USPS and the resulting necessity of dealing with bulk mailers, the author is doing his readers a huge disservice by offering trite solutions to knotty problems, essentially arguing that the USPS should pick up the costs of mail forwarding on behalf of a service which reduces the utility (and thus revenue) of the USPS's largest income stream (bulk delivery).

In 2014 Derek was selected for Forbes' top 30 under 30 list for law and policy and as a 2014 Global Leader of Tomorrow, for thought leadership and activism on NSA surveillance and innovation policy.

I'm pretty sure that if the USPS had been offering to open, scan, digitally archive, and destroy your physical mail for the last decade as Derek says they should have been, he'd be writing a similarly indignant rant about big government overreach and the crowding out of private competitors, regardless of assurances about strict siloing or privacy controls.