Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this,

Thanks for engaging with the discussion. With respect to the thought that came to you back in the early email days, I don't mean to be pedantic when I say this, and it may have had definite merit — like ensuring services that are naturally monopolistic due to network effects, are provided by an entity collectively controlled by the public — but an email service wouldn't fit the economic definition of a public good. An open source codebase allowing anyone to set up their own mail server would be the public good in that domain. A table that gives examples of private vs public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_exclusivity_and_competitiveness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goods#Goods_classified_by_excl... Public goods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) For more complex goods, involving management of platforms, I think the only type of public good that could compete with proprietary offerings is the software that allows people to form a decentralized consensus and run applications on top of it, e.g. blockchain node software and smart contract code, respectively.