Interop requirements may serve better than direct government control.
At the very least, it’s worth being clear eyed with respect to the quality of government run services.
What would be necessary for the government to run a service like Amazon successfully? Is our government today capable of doing such a thing? I think the answer is clearly no.
With that critical truth that you've touched on said... American civilian resident-facing government services tend to be organized and run with all the strong incentives being to make it good for everyone but the residents. Usually the workforce has a strong union and management has their goals, but us users have no strong force to exert except distant oversight in the form of Congress.
Some organizations escape this. Others do so partially at best. Most do not. State DMVs are notorious pits of utter misery, and this is generally an honest reflection of experience.
You can report a passport lost online, but you have to file a DS-11 in black ink at a post office to request a new one. This process can be easy or hard unpredictably, depending mainly on how nice the postal worker feels that day. There are few to no organizational incentives towards better customer service.
Why black ink? Because the State Department says so. And they don't have to care what you think.
Idk if USPS is truly an example of excellence, even if they are an example of govt excellence. In 2020 they shipped 70 billion packages, of which 90% was spam.
They do police package contents to a degree, but only for actual crimes. Postal spam isn't a crime (and probably shouldn't be, as much as I'd like to get rid of the spam).
They do police package contents, pretty heavily even. They allow spam (presorted bulk mail in post office terms) because the spammers have a strong lobby.
Aliexpress is Ebay, not amazon. That being said, both feature a decent return policy, shitty and invariably wrong item description, no ability to properly filter goods and fake reviewes.
The only dailight I see between them is the shipoing time and language.
You said "X would be great" but didn't explain why, so a response like "No, X would be bad" is equally lacking in details. Its hard to discuss anything without an underlying basis for the conversation. There is no precedent for the US government providing services comparable to Amazon at comparable cost/benefit.
I explained why, commercial goods and services would have a safe sponsored forum to sell their wares without worrying about a profit hungry giant measuring their success, cloning their business and driving them to bankruptcy.
You have identified a goal, which is a great start, and is definitely worth considering. However, I see a few gaps when connecting the dots. At present, there is nothing stopping one vendor from cloning another vendors products and services and marketing them outside of Amazon. So many products these days are just white-label goods made in China and rebranded elsewhere. Also, should the government really be in involved in managing logistics, storing and shipping smartphones and sneakers all over the world? I don't see this as the best use of our tax-dollars.
Amtrak is great. I generally like government-run services. Have you tried dealing with your local cable monopoly? It's a nightmare -- why not get the government involved so things work more smoothly and there is more competition?
Change my mind then? What would be worse in that situation?