The modern state has made a simple demand of its citizens: participate digitally or do not participate at all.
Tax returns must be filed online. Court notices are delivered electronically. Healthcare systems, licensing regimes and benefit payments are now mediated through digital portals. The analogue state has been dismantled, often quite deliberately, on the basis of cost efficiency.
But there is an obvious gap in this transformation. The state has digitised service delivery without providing the infrastructure necessary to access it.
A citizen may require an email address to receive a tax notification, reset an authentication credential, or confirm an identity transaction. Yet the state does not provide that email address. Instead, it forces the citizen into the private market—where the default option is the “free”, advertising-funded inbox.
This is an economic fiction. The service is not free. It is paid for by data extraction. The citizen trades behavioural information and metadata in exchange for the ability to interact with their own government. It is a coercive arrangement. There is no meaningful opt-out.
The consequences are not trivial. Every interaction with the state generates metadata: timestamps, institutional relationships, patterns of communication. The moment that information enters a corporate inbox, it is captured, analysed, and incorporated into behavioural profiles. The state has secured the front door with identity systems. It has left the pipeline exposed; this is not how public infrastructure works.
When Sir Rowland Hill reformed the British postal system in the nineteenth century, he recognised that communication was not a luxury commodity but a foundational network. The state provided it accordingly. Uniform access created efficiency, security, and inclusion. The same principle now applies to digital communication.
The state should provide every citizen with a basic, secure email account and a modest allocation of web storage—either at cost or funded through general taxation. This would not eliminate private providers. Citizens remain free to use commercial services. But it would ensure that access to government is not conditional on participation in surveillance markets.
The benefits are immediate:
- Data sovereignty: government communications remain within national standards for security and privacy.
- Reduced leakage: citizens are no longer forced to expose sensitive civic interactions to corporate data extraction systems.
- Simplification: a single, reliable digital address reduces fragmentation across public services.
- Continuity: a state-managed contact point provides a stable reference for lifecycle events, including death and estate management.
The objection is cost. It is misplaced. The infrastructure required for basic email and storage is trivial compared to historical investments in roads, post, or telecommunications. The state has already eliminated the cost of physical correspondence. It can redeploy a fraction of that saving.
The real objection is conceptual. Governments have come to believe that infrastructure should be outsourced if it can be purchased cheaply. In doing so, they have forgotten the function of infrastructure: not simply to operate, but to protect.
Digital communication is now essential to citizenship. It should be treated as such.