PostNord AB is a private company and has been for some years, so the idea that this is a government service being withdrawn is untrue.
Danish law requires everyone to have access to postal services for letters. Therefore another private company, DAO, will provide postal delivery to everyone in Denmark and the ability for everyone in Denmark to send letters from DAO service points (in shops, etc).
A significant subsidy is being provided to DAO to enable a universal delivery service.
DAO will be the national postal service for international treaty (UPU) purposes, enabling letter and small parcel post between Denmark and other countries according to UPU agreements.
Right. Then the accurate description is that it's a state-owned commercial company, not a government agency.
Ownership by states doesn't make it a public service. It makes it a company whose shareholders happen to be governments. It still operates under corporate law, not administrative law, and it was explicitly removed from being a state service.
Calling that "not really private" is just rhetorical framing, not a legal or operational distinction.
It's not privately owned so it's not really a private company even if it has to abide by the same laws. I don't get why you accuse me of rhetorical framing, it's what the ownership situation looks like.
Fair enough; we're using different definitions of "private."
I'm using it in the legal/operational sense relevant to whether a government service was withdrawn (agency vs company, public law vs company law). By that definition, it's a private company.
You're using it in a shareholder-ownership sense. That's a valid perspective, but it's a different question than the one being discussed here.
OpenAI has close to 1 billion users which are mostly free users and will switch provider the moment OpenAI start charging them or adding ads. Which they will, as OpenAI themselves said they are losing money even with 200$ subs. So that amount of users is pretty meaningless.
Google and Microsoft have immense money printing machines. They can lose many billions of dollars for years and be fine as a business. OpenAI, not so much.
All of these have ads. And none of these have an equal value alternative. OpenAI, Claude, Deepseek, Mistral, Gemini, are mostly the same to a regular user.
Bing is mostly the same. Kagi is mostly the same. Yahoo, Yandex, etc. It's 2025. Hardly any difference. There were tens of search engines in the 90s and 2000s that were generally mostly the same. Yet, Google still won and owned nearly all search monetization.
Search was even easier to switch. At least ChatGPT has memory.
Most chat apps are the same as Whatsapp. All of them are free too.
"Ask ChaGPT" is the equivalent to "google it" in 2025.
No those are all significantly worse products, or at least were for a long time. I don't think OpenAI has anything close to a moat. They don't even have a short fence.
It's meaningful because it shows that people like the product a lot, and for a lot of different reasons. There are only few products that can reach such market penetration, not to mention in only three years. As the quality of AI increases, people will quickly realise that they are willing to pay for it as much as they pay for electricity. And the same goes for businesses.
Isn't that akin to a 1990s tech model like CompuServe or AOL? "Let's create this awesome environment where people will want to pay us for this wonderful service, we'll send them a CD in the mail to get them started withh a free month, then charge $0.30/minute. We'll make a fortune!"
Indeed, but in the end they all have to cover their costs. People are already getting real, measurable value out of them and they will be willing to pay for it like they pay for utilities. Though I'm not excluding that the AI companies will manage to create some kind of moat to keep their customers (such as personalisation, memory, etc.).
In Germany, Beleidigung has been a criminal offense for decades. Courts (not "authorities") can compel platforms to identify users after due process. No one is being "persecuted", no one is going to a "gulag", and weight is irrelevant.
If you want to argue that criminal defamation laws are bad, do that. But stop dressing an old legal reality up as dystopia.
This is a lot of pearl-clutching for someone who opened with an insult and then ran out of substance. If you have an actual counterargument, try that. Otherwise, spare us the theatrics.
Yes, countries in EU prosecute crime. This may be a surprise to some people, but for a long time publicly insulting someone has been a crime in Germany.
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