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"
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.
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 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.
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_.
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,
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...
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.
It's been decades since I wrote a letter and mailed it.
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.