You're absolutely right - everyone has offloaded the 'identity verification problem' to your email provider. Because doing it well is an intrinsically hard/expensive problem.
Replace 'government should provide a digital identity service' with 'government should provide an email service', and we're back at the same place. You still needs a way to prove that you are you - with legal protection and recourse.
This letter points out the increasingly obvious - that our online identities have become too important to be left to the customer support whims of one or two corporations. The idea that an innocent algorithmic mistake in a microservice running somewhere deep in Google's cloud could lock me out of my life is not the future we want.
> You still needs a way to prove that you are you - with legal protection and recourse.
You actually have something that you can use- your reputation. It is difficult to fake your likeness, even moreso to people who actually know you. A combination of past preshared secrets (memories) alongside your likeness is enough to get people who DO have ID to vouch for your identity- family, your landlord, your neighbor, your lawyer, your employer, past schoolteacher, anyone who can reasonably be expected to recognize you and have had some experiences with you, can discern whether or not you are who you say you are.
From there you could have access to your theoretical USPS or Library email, add an additional PGP key to publicly-funded keyservers, and generally use the power of this vouch to escalate from there.
Even if you make an extreme edge-case argument, saying that someone has some extreme amnesia and finds themselves far away from their home, the government could just let you generate a completely new identity for a small fee, so that you aren't left high and dry without one.
Replace 'government should provide a digital identity service' with 'government should provide an email service', and we're back at the same place. You still needs a way to prove that you are you - with legal protection and recourse.
This letter points out the increasingly obvious - that our online identities have become too important to be left to the customer support whims of one or two corporations. The idea that an innocent algorithmic mistake in a microservice running somewhere deep in Google's cloud could lock me out of my life is not the future we want.