alt Hacker NewsThe US Postal Service seems to derive upwards of 90% of their revenue (Or at least of the mail I receive) from similar scams. Are they going to have the same fines applied to them?
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And you can't escape. Facebook is less of a concern because you can just not go to the website and you're good. The US Postal Service is the basis of an entire huge industry devoted to finding you at your physical location to try to scam you.
You have a very different profile of junk mail than I do. While the services may be overpriced or of dubious quality, they are rarely outright scams the way FB marketplace frequently is.
Common carrier vs. curated platform?
How would you find a government entity? This is just moving money from one government budget to another.
The USPS is like this because of the persistent belief that it's not enough for government entities (think USPS, Amtrak, etc) to provide a good service for the citizens - they must also (try to) turn a profit.
If we as a society considered it acceptable for the USPS to spend money to ensure everyone in the US had mail access without selling out to corporations to turn a profit, they wouldn't need to have products like EDDM blasting spam to entire zip codes.
The US Postal Service doesn't serve the American people, by its own admission. I can find the quote from the Postmaster General if you like, but the gist of it was "the 400 direct mailers are our customers". They are a spam company that has outlived its usefulness, if ever it had any. Don't fine them, dissolve them.
If you think there is actual fraud going on via the US mail, report it. The Postal Service takes mail fraud very seriously.
But I suspect you mean to say 90% of what ends up in your mailbox is junk. If that's the case, there's a fix for that, too:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36131222