Comment by AnthonyMouse
3 days ago
The thing that results in enshittification is market consolidation. Notice that Comcast sucks whereas there aren't a lot of complaints about Big Shampoo because that's a fairly competitive market.
If the government needs trucks then they should just buy trucks, not build a factory to make trucks and then another factory to make lead acid batteries for the trucks and then start mining lead to make the batteries etc.
At some point they have to interface with the market and you still have to solve the problem of keeping the market competitive and keeping the bidding process from being captured. If you're not doing those things then you're screwed either way; if you are doing them then it's better to just buy finished goods than to have civil servants manufacturing doorknobs and operating rubber tree plantations to make weather stripping.
I think that's true for widgets but it becomes much more opaque when it comes to digital services, particularly those that handle sensitive information. Sure there's govcloud and fedramp these days but if the US federal government had chosen to build that hardware out in house I think that would have been a reasonable decision. It's similar to private versus in house security personnel where there are arguments in favor of both.
The real case here is software. The government can license it instead of writing it, but what it should actually do is buy it and release it into the public domain instead of licensing it. Which still doesn't require them to write it themselves, but in >90% of the cases they need software, they should be causing what they use to be in the public domain, and commissioning new code to release whenever the incumbents won't do it for less than the cost of writing new.
There's a big difference between physical products, which, once the government has them, it can just use them, and digital infrastructure, which has a number of issues.
The two big ones I see off the top of my head are:
1) Once the government has paid for digital services from some private company, they are then providing those digital services to their country's public.
2) Because of that, they are then also storing their people's data in those systems.
If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.
If Microsoft decides they don't like the government of Belgium, even if they don't decide to do anything nefarious with the data (which is absolutely a real concern, both from malice and incompetence), they can shut off their services overnight and then the people of Belgium have no governmental websites or digital services. (And if they have a contract that says they can't...well, what's Belgium going to do about it? Ask Trump real real nice to make Microsoft keep the lights on?) Or, even if they're perfectly polite and commit to an orderly transition, Belgium still has to put in absolutely massive amounts of time, effort, and money to select a new vendor and migrate all their data and retrain all their people on the completely different interfaces and such.
Whereas when they start buying new vans from Mercedes...the drivers might have to remember that the radio's volume knob is 5cm away from where it was in the Fords...?
> If (say) Ford decides they don't like the government of (say) Belgium, and don't want to sell them any more transit vans (or whatever), that's not really a huge deal. Belgium has the vans already, and they can just get another supplier for the next set.
That's a pretty significant problem if Ford was the only places you can get certain parts or the only company that can do certain types of service etc., because then you have a huge fleet of vehicles you can't efficiently continue to operate.
But then it's the same solution. Before you buy something, require it to be using standard interfaces and have multiple viable independent suppliers for parts and service rather than being locked into a monopoly.
Which is how it should be for digital services. It's fine to pay some company to run physical infrastructure as long as it's a fungible commodity that allows you to switch providers like you can switch brands of toilet paper.