GameFly Scores In Longstanding DVD Mailing Complaint

An anonymous reader writes "GamePolitics reports that the Postal Regulatory Commission has ordered [PDF] the U.S. Postal Service to equalize the rates paid by mailers who send round trip DVDs, and concluding (sort of) a dispute that has been underway for more than four years. The new postage rates take effect on September 30th. Some mailers, prominantly Netflix, send their round-trip movie DVDs as 'letters,' but GameFly's gaming disks are sent in slightly bigger envelopes as 'flats' to avoid breakage, and so GameFly has paid a much higher postage rate. GameFly argued that this was unfair discriminatory treatment because USPS was providing special hand-sorting treatment for Netflix disks without charging Netflix for the extra handling. But now there's a new twist: the Postal Service wants to reclassify DVD mailing [PDF] as a competitive product, where the prices would not be limited by the rate of inflation, because it says that mailed DVDs compete with the internet, streaming services, and kiosks such as Redbox. The regulatory agency is accepting responses [PDF] from interested persons until September 11th to the Postal Service's latest comments on its request [PDF]."

Re:o man

[serviscope_minor]

Those rates, BTW, are not sufficient to fund the Postal Service pension system at the level Congress demands

Quite. For those who missed it, the rates are entirely fine to find the pension scheme. Naturally government run stuff has to be bad (for some reason) so they mandated the most insane pension scheme ever (funding pensions for people quite a few years away from being born) just so the USPS would "fail". Even so, due to the strength of it the crisis is not terminal, which does go to show how good it was.

I'm assuming that congress is wrecking the USPS for the same reason Parliament is wrecking the Royal Mail, namely so they can prove their flawed ideology that all government run stuff must be bad and use that as an excuse to sell it off to some of their cronies.