Just to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms:
Under law:
DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring).
But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.
Under government contract:
DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.
Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service.
The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"
In the Netherlands the post office is contractually obliged to deliver mail but they are LOSING money on it.
Even the government themselves went full digital...
Personally I think that if people think post services are a national priority it should be subsidised with tax money. Cannot expect a private company to burn money.
Canada Post is losing money on parcel delivery, not just regular mail. They are pretty awful as a service (for anything serious at least) and are constantly going on strike, so everyone is flocking to private competition. I've had 3 different packages end up in a purgatory in 2 different strikes and now I use Fedex instead.
Which is funny because parcel delivery has only grown over the last decade while Canada Post loses more and more money, while their union workers are demanding pay raises and job security.
I generally agree (my post history should back my anti-neoliberalism), but I suppose eventually the postal service becomes a relic that can't operate on the same terms. At what loss should we accept a letter to be delivered? Or should they charge the real cost of delivering it?
EU governments are cutting costs everywhere, this is the end result of recession-era policies.
Of course it could also be due to mismanagement. If Amazon is allowed to subcontract its own delivery people, and somehow that's profitable, public post companies might find ways to stay relevant.
I am for postal service being reformed and handle digital communication as well.
But let's not forget that network and electricity are not given once and for all. We may end up experiencing quite long periods without them. Country that would get rid of related infra and know-how would be helpless.
It’s striking that while many states push citizens toward digital-only public services, almost none provide a state-run email service. Instead, official communication is effectively outsourced to foreign, commercial platforms with uneven privacy records (e.g. Gmail).
If governments are serious about digital sovereignty and data protection, they should operate their own email infrastructure and issue each citizen an official address, much like a social security number. Whether people actually use it or prefer a private alternative should remain a personal choice—but the state shouldn’t depend on third-party platforms as its default communication layer.
It is actually much worse than that. Much like banking, the push for digital government services in many countries has ended up more or less requiring every citizen to own an up-to-date, non-jailbroken iOS or Android device. If you blocked your phone from accessing Apple or Google servers (or if it's 6 years old, a dumb phone or runs GrapheneOS), the support staff will just tell you to walk to your closest Best Buy equivalent and grab the cheapest Android device you can find; in the name of "security" there often is no fallback option, and when there is one it's SMS 2FA which is (understandably) rate limited to three uses per year.
If your phone gets stolen, meanwhile, you may find yourself unable to log into the police's portal for reporting it.
This is something that worries me. I know that the laws/constitution that guarantees the rights of somebody may vary from country to country (and may not even be enforced by the letter), but lets say: All commercial companies will have a ToS, data sharing agreements, etc. You, as a user, i assume is not obligated to agree to that ToS at the expense of not using the service. If a government body requires you to use their service to access basic services (and offers no 'offline' alternative) required by law, are they, by proxy, coercing you to accept a commercial ToS? I would very much like to hear a lawyer opinion on this.
I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
The post was only state run because it was necessary. The Romans and the Sassanians for instance did not provide mail service to their subjects. I think you're big picture is still too small. The world existed fine on private mail carriers, it will in the future to.
The Dutch government has one approach to the email service issue, by having a website and app, Berichtenbox, where you can receive official communications. They're regularly extending it to include municipalities as well.
However it's one-way only at the moment, there's no way to use it for two-way communication.
It also requires either a phone or computer that’s increasingly owned by private corporations. The only OS that doesn’t restrict what I can do with it is Linux.
I think that companies providing certain basic services like email or messaging should eventually become branches of the government. This is the only way to provide these services with subsidies without enshittification.
They could rely on providing banking services via shoddy software, and prosecute people, and hound them to death rather than face up as to how crap their software is, until someone makes a TV mini series about it to highlight the issue.
So if I’m in Denmark and I want to send my friend a piece of paper with something written on it, what happens now?
I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.
> Danes will still be able to send letters, using the delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark but will expand its services from 1 January from about 30m letters in 2025 to 80m next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao shop to post their letters – or pay extra to have it collected from home – and pay for postage either online or via an app.
It's been a private company for over a decade and a half. This is pretty common in many European countries. e.g. Germany's postal system is wholly owned by DHL.
Are duopolies like iOS & Android much better? I used to trust the mail (in various European countries or the US for example). I don't have a good feeling about either Apple or Google. Especially not as a European, knowing that according to US law I have no rights.
I think the question is whether a competitor can become established. Can you run a mail delivery service if you only have local coverage? I don’t know. In the past, maybe you could use the national postal service to fill in the gaps as you scale up a delivery network, but I can’t see the established monopoly giving bulk discounts to a potential competitor. Trucks, vans, sorting facilities and workforces are very expensive to set up, and once they’re set up you can basically optimize them month by month etc. A new competitor has to speculatively spend an awful lot of money before they can deploy anything in any optimal way.
Parcel delivery is clearly not a natural monopoly; there are several carriers, including some that only have a limited footprint. I don't see why you couldn't expand from parcels to letters; although economics would probably be tough.
It's not a monopoly. While FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the likes are not obliged by law to deliver mail, they will certainly do it if the price is good. Even Uber does it.
Lysander Spooner tried offering letter services cheaper than the postal service in the US, and by most measures was better and cheaper at it. As it turns out as soon as you can do it cheaper, they just did what government does and used their monopoly on violence to put him in a tiny cage.
n 1844, hearing from citizens from every party and under pressure to reform the postal system, Washington lawmakers and the Postmaster General had no intention of sitting still for any of "that Spooner's shenanigans." Suits against Spooner and his cohorts began. Railroad heads were given full warning that contracts for government mails would be removed and fines imposed unless space and passage were refused to private letter carriers. It was "round one" for the government when an agent of Spooner's company in Baltimore was found guilty and fined for transporting letters in a railroad car over a post road of the United States. Spooner himself was arrested in New York on March 7 on three charges by special agents of the Post Office. Another of his agents, Calvin Case, was held to bail for $100 around March 23 for carrying letters on the train.
In Denmark the physical post offices have been closed since a few years (cost reduction). Even stamps aren't printed anymore (you have to pay online to get a code that you print or write on the letter or parcel).
What I don't see mentioned here or in the article:
PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed.
The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.
Denmark has an official system for sending digital mail, which is how we receive letters from the government, bank statements, pay slips, and so on. Without this base load of paper mail, the economics of delivering paper mail stopped working.
Will companies be willing to pay more to send junk mail if it is no longer largely subsidized? In this regard it could be a good thing assuming they don’t already have a regulation against junk mail there.
Fifty years ago, I was given a coin bank styled after the red Danish Post letter box. That was in Solvang, CA. As these Danish immigrant-character communities (look also in Elkhorn, Racine, Greenville, etc) are little time capsules, you may have to travel to America to find a replica red slot to drop your letter.
The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract.
EDIT: maybe Royal Mail was never the Danish term, but I thought it was on a Lego set too...
Many USPS outlets seem to be run down. But in my experience, mail delivery is pretty solid. And there is indeed a country without postal mail service. Panama!
Writing some xmas cards right now and going to mail them in a bit. It's fun. You should try it out.
Fun to go shopping at craft fairs and give some money to indie artists for well made art. Send in the mail with a little note and stay in touch with old pals.
Which makes taking the time to send a letter have a lot of importance. I wrote a note to my mother and it meant a lot to her to get a hand written correspondence.
My PO Box is listed in my /hn/ profile, and I respond with funny homemade postcards. I stopped using email a decade ago; quit texts right after Covid started. Yes, I have a one-way pager (digits only) that is given out to less than a dozen contacts.
Love letterwriting — have had and regularly-used my Smith Corona [typewriter] for half my life (over two decades). Its especially helpful for tax forms and legal documents (my area courts still accept non-digital when pro se).
For Christmas last year I helped my state judge brother set up his own typewriter [a very nice IBM Selectric II]. He's not much older than me, but needs it for [reasons].
I live in Sweden, and I can confidently say... Once.
As in, literally as long as I've lived here (11 years now) I mailed one thing by post and it was, somewhat ironically, a self-assessment form for an ADHD diagnosis from a company called Modigo.
I have received a lot of mail though, from the government also, so I'm not sure how that is gonna fly.
Slightly related: In Finland all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default starting Jan 1st, 2026. There is the possibility to opt out. I am not convinced this is a wise direction. When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications. Yes, even elections are stored offshore.
Counterpoint: because most Finns think about Russian interference, the likelihood there's a tentative plan is high. Or you know, they call you. And in a country of 5m people, you can probably ask someone, who knows someone else, who knows whoever has that information in the government.
It is still the 2nd largest company in Sweden. They just gave up on Denmarks mail contract after the vast majority of people stopped sending mail and now another company is taking over the much smaller operation.
I know some people are mentioning a private provider who will be around. But they will charge a lot I’m sure, and this will continue to kill the practice of writing letters or sending greeting cards. It’s a bit sad knowing people will forget the value of a personal touch, and they’ll not know what they lost when all they do is send each other a text message or whatever.
When this came up earlier in the month (Denmark gets ready to cancel Christmas cardshttps://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-rea... ) it seemed more like PostNord was just stepping back opening the market up to other 'rivals' to continue service.
Just to clarify. There is at least one chosen and contractually bound Mail Service provider in Denmark. Their terms are set in public tenders. The old state owned company - Post Nord - basically decide not to compete for the contract. A newer company - DAO - won the tender. What this means in legal terms:
Under law: DAO must comply with its postal permit obligations (nationwide service where offered, pricing transparency, quality monitoring). But there is no absolute legal universal delivery duty for all mail anymore.
Under government contract: DAO has a specific binding duty to deliver blind mail as defined in the tender it won - this is a contractual obligation, not a general statutory duty for all mail.
Be mindful that in principle the service provider could chose to not cover certain parts of the country. That has to be clearly stated in their terms of service. The Danish government are expected by the public to continue to subsidize delivery to people with special needs, in the contract identified as "blind mail"
And the reason the existing public corporation shut down service in Denmark
> citing a 90% decline in letter mail since 2000
Canada Post is in financial crisis for similar reasons.
Ha, Germany is safe. Not because the postal service is/is not/has to be profitable but because our government fucks up everything digital.
In the Netherlands the post office is contractually obliged to deliver mail but they are LOSING money on it.
Even the government themselves went full digital... Personally I think that if people think post services are a national priority it should be subsidised with tax money. Cannot expect a private company to burn money.
Canada Post is losing money on parcel delivery, not just regular mail. They are pretty awful as a service (for anything serious at least) and are constantly going on strike, so everyone is flocking to private competition. I've had 3 different packages end up in a purgatory in 2 different strikes and now I use Fedex instead.
Which is funny because parcel delivery has only grown over the last decade while Canada Post loses more and more money, while their union workers are demanding pay raises and job security.
When strikes happen, do packages really just vanish into the void?
Why doesn't the government just make the strikes illegal?
Postal service is a public service, thus there shouldn't be any contracts, TOS or competition.
Sad to see civilizational damages caused by neoliberalism, even in such countries as Denmark.
I generally agree (my post history should back my anti-neoliberalism), but I suppose eventually the postal service becomes a relic that can't operate on the same terms. At what loss should we accept a letter to be delivered? Or should they charge the real cost of delivering it?
EU governments are cutting costs everywhere, this is the end result of recession-era policies.
Of course it could also be due to mismanagement. If Amazon is allowed to subcontract its own delivery people, and somehow that's profitable, public post companies might find ways to stay relevant.
I am for postal service being reformed and handle digital communication as well.
But let's not forget that network and electricity are not given once and for all. We may end up experiencing quite long periods without them. Country that would get rid of related infra and know-how would be helpless.
We keep optimizing systems, but human life doesn’t necessarily optimize along with them.
When a society becomes fully efficient, people start craving the slow, the physical, the intentional.
It’s striking that while many states push citizens toward digital-only public services, almost none provide a state-run email service. Instead, official communication is effectively outsourced to foreign, commercial platforms with uneven privacy records (e.g. Gmail). If governments are serious about digital sovereignty and data protection, they should operate their own email infrastructure and issue each citizen an official address, much like a social security number. Whether people actually use it or prefer a private alternative should remain a personal choice—but the state shouldn’t depend on third-party platforms as its default communication layer.
It is actually much worse than that. Much like banking, the push for digital government services in many countries has ended up more or less requiring every citizen to own an up-to-date, non-jailbroken iOS or Android device. If you blocked your phone from accessing Apple or Google servers (or if it's 6 years old, a dumb phone or runs GrapheneOS), the support staff will just tell you to walk to your closest Best Buy equivalent and grab the cheapest Android device you can find; in the name of "security" there often is no fallback option, and when there is one it's SMS 2FA which is (understandably) rate limited to three uses per year.
If your phone gets stolen, meanwhile, you may find yourself unable to log into the police's portal for reporting it.
This is something that worries me. I know that the laws/constitution that guarantees the rights of somebody may vary from country to country (and may not even be enforced by the letter), but lets say: All commercial companies will have a ToS, data sharing agreements, etc. You, as a user, i assume is not obligated to agree to that ToS at the expense of not using the service. If a government body requires you to use their service to access basic services (and offers no 'offline' alternative) required by law, are they, by proxy, coercing you to accept a commercial ToS? I would very much like to hear a lawyer opinion on this.
I know some government may do this with intent, but i imagine many governments simply never thought about it, or no citizen ever didn't accepted a "popular smartphone OS provider's ToS" and challenged that government requirement. I know some make offline alternatives very inconvenient, but that still technically legal.
The post was only state run because it was necessary. The Romans and the Sassanians for instance did not provide mail service to their subjects. I think you're big picture is still too small. The world existed fine on private mail carriers, it will in the future to.
The Dutch government has one approach to the email service issue, by having a website and app, Berichtenbox, where you can receive official communications. They're regularly extending it to include municipalities as well.
However it's one-way only at the moment, there's no way to use it for two-way communication.
It also requires either a phone or computer that’s increasingly owned by private corporations. The only OS that doesn’t restrict what I can do with it is Linux.
> state-run email service
I think that companies providing certain basic services like email or messaging should eventually become branches of the government. This is the only way to provide these services with subsidies without enshittification.
It could be worse.
They could rely on providing banking services via shoddy software, and prosecute people, and hound them to death rather than face up as to how crap their software is, until someone makes a TV mini series about it to highlight the issue.
So if I’m in Denmark and I want to send my friend a piece of paper with something written on it, what happens now?
I assume I have to go into the post office and send it as a parcel (at higher cost), rather than slapping a stamp on it and dropping it into the post box, but the effect is otherwise mostly the same.
From the article:
> Danes will still be able to send letters, using the delivery company Dao, which already delivers letters in Denmark but will expand its services from 1 January from about 30m letters in 2025 to 80m next year. But customers will instead have to go to a Dao shop to post their letters – or pay extra to have it collected from home – and pay for postage either online or via an app.
In other words they've just privatised the mail service.
More like contracted it out. You might be surprised at the amount of US mail that is delivered by contractors. They've just taken it all the way.
It's been a private company for over a decade and a half. This is pretty common in many European countries. e.g. Germany's postal system is wholly owned by DHL.
It’s the other way around, DHL is owned by Deutsche Post AG.
With a monopoly no less.
Natural monopolies with no guard rails always end poorly
Are duopolies like iOS & Android much better? I used to trust the mail (in various European countries or the US for example). I don't have a good feeling about either Apple or Google. Especially not as a European, knowing that according to US law I have no rights.
Is letter/parcel delivery a natural monopoly? I think of systems with hard infrastructure that use the public way like roads, rail, and pipes.
I think the question is whether a competitor can become established. Can you run a mail delivery service if you only have local coverage? I don’t know. In the past, maybe you could use the national postal service to fill in the gaps as you scale up a delivery network, but I can’t see the established monopoly giving bulk discounts to a potential competitor. Trucks, vans, sorting facilities and workforces are very expensive to set up, and once they’re set up you can basically optimize them month by month etc. A new competitor has to speculatively spend an awful lot of money before they can deploy anything in any optimal way.
Parcel delivery is clearly not a natural monopoly; there are several carriers, including some that only have a limited footprint. I don't see why you couldn't expand from parcels to letters; although economics would probably be tough.
> I don't see why you couldn't expand from parcels to letters;
If they have a state sanctioned monopoly you legally just can't.
Sure, but state enforced monopoly is not a natural monopoly.
It's not a monopoly. While FedEx, UPS, DHL, and the likes are not obliged by law to deliver mail, they will certainly do it if the price is good. Even Uber does it.
Lysander Spooner tried offering letter services cheaper than the postal service in the US, and by most measures was better and cheaper at it. As it turns out as soon as you can do it cheaper, they just did what government does and used their monopoly on violence to put him in a tiny cage.
https://www.pennypost.org/pdf/penny-post-archive/PennyPost20...Is this the plot of back to the future part 2?
No hallowed skein of stars can ward, I trow, Who's once been set his tryst with Trystero.
But: You don't seem to aöbe able to pay the new provider in cash. You need to pay online or using an app. (I have no insights, just from reading TFA.)
They have shops.
> and pay for postage either online or via an app
No cash?
In Denmark the physical post offices have been closed since a few years (cost reduction). Even stamps aren't printed anymore (you have to pay online to get a code that you print or write on the letter or parcel).
What I don't see mentioned here or in the article:
PostNord Denmark has been operating with massive losses for a while now, in part because they were required by law to be able to deliver everywhere in Denmark, when there were very little demand for it. The money just isn't there, which is why the law has been changed.
The cost of sending a letter was also just going up and up. In 2025, it cost $4.55 _per letter_.
Denmark is tiny though? Why does it cost $5 per letter?
Denmark has an official system for sending digital mail, which is how we receive letters from the government, bank statements, pay slips, and so on. Without this base load of paper mail, the economics of delivering paper mail stopped working.
Will companies be willing to pay more to send junk mail if it is no longer largely subsidized? In this regard it could be a good thing assuming they don’t already have a regulation against junk mail there.
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Fifty years ago, I was given a coin bank styled after the red Danish Post letter box. That was in Solvang, CA. As these Danish immigrant-character communities (look also in Elkhorn, Racine, Greenville, etc) are little time capsules, you may have to travel to America to find a replica red slot to drop your letter.
The article wasn't clear how letters from outside Denmark will be handled, but maybe that's implicit in the Dao contract.
EDIT: maybe Royal Mail was never the Danish term, but I thought it was on a Lego set too...
There is nothing worse, than a rotten mail delivery system:
https://expatcircle.com/cms/underrated-quality-of-life-indic...
Many USPS outlets seem to be run down. But in my experience, mail delivery is pretty solid. And there is indeed a country without postal mail service. Panama!
It's been decades since I wrote a letter and mailed it.
Writing some xmas cards right now and going to mail them in a bit. It's fun. You should try it out.
Fun to go shopping at craft fairs and give some money to indie artists for well made art. Send in the mail with a little note and stay in touch with old pals.
Which makes taking the time to send a letter have a lot of importance. I wrote a note to my mother and it meant a lot to her to get a hand written correspondence.
I can send one to you if you want :-)
My PO Box is listed in my /hn/ profile, and I respond with funny homemade postcards. I stopped using email a decade ago; quit texts right after Covid started. Yes, I have a one-way pager (digits only) that is given out to less than a dozen contacts.
Love letterwriting — have had and regularly-used my Smith Corona [typewriter] for half my life (over two decades). Its especially helpful for tax forms and legal documents (my area courts still accept non-digital when pro se).
For Christmas last year I helped my state judge brother set up his own typewriter [a very nice IBM Selectric II]. He's not much older than me, but needs it for [reasons].
How long has it been since you needed to mail a physical document to a bank, a government department, or something similar?
I live in Sweden, and I can confidently say... Once.
As in, literally as long as I've lived here (11 years now) I mailed one thing by post and it was, somewhat ironically, a self-assessment form for an ADHD diagnosis from a company called Modigo.
I have received a lot of mail though, from the government also, so I'm not sure how that is gonna fly.
I mailed in my taxes last April, as I always have.
I mail documents frequently, but not letters.
In 40+ years. Never
Hours, for me.
Mail will arrive straight at the museum
Slightly related: In Finland all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default starting Jan 1st, 2026. There is the possibility to opt out. I am not convinced this is a wise direction. When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications. Yes, even elections are stored offshore.
Counterpoint: because most Finns think about Russian interference, the likelihood there's a tentative plan is high. Or you know, they call you. And in a country of 5m people, you can probably ask someone, who knows someone else, who knows whoever has that information in the government.
You can ask someone who asks someone who is in the voting register or what taxes to pay? Not convinced. 5 million are more than 50.
> When Putin cuts a couple of sea cables again we are not able to access official communications.
Do you route all your mail through other countries ?
> all official mail from authorities will become electronic by default
So, all they did was privatize their postal service. There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company.
I doubt this will end well, but Denmark is a small country so maybe it will work.
After a year it would be nice to see stats and compare delivery time, lost mail, cost between Dao and the old service,
It was already a corporate entity running it, just one owned by both Swedish and Denmark governments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostNord?wprov=sfti1#
It is still the 2nd largest company in Sweden. They just gave up on Denmarks mail contract after the vast majority of people stopped sending mail and now another company is taking over the much smaller operation.
It’s been privatized for the past 15 years or so. It’s just change of contractor.
> There will still have a postal service, but run by a private company.
They shall do it like in the energy sector: one company who takes it from the sender, one to transport it and one to deluver it to the receiver. /s
I know some people are mentioning a private provider who will be around. But they will charge a lot I’m sure, and this will continue to kill the practice of writing letters or sending greeting cards. It’s a bit sad knowing people will forget the value of a personal touch, and they’ll not know what they lost when all they do is send each other a text message or whatever.
Previously when it was announced earlier this year:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43278934
When this came up earlier in the month (Denmark gets ready to cancel Christmas cards https://www.economist.com/europe/2025/11/27/denmark-gets-rea... ) it seemed more like PostNord was just stepping back opening the market up to other 'rivals' to continue service.
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