[mbalyuzi]

I find it interesting that there seems to be a (wilful?) ignorance on the part of our government as to quite how big and powerful those corporations are.

There seems to be a bit of a "We're the government, so they'll have to do what we ask/tell" going on here I suspect. Probably coupled with incompetent IT project management that didn't bother to worry about the terms and conditions they signed up to, because that was too hard.

[spacemanmatt]

After seeing what Facebook would let the Russian government do, who in the U.S. government would cross them unless they had momentum for an antitrust suit and that includes a Supreme Court ready to enforce a pro-citizen regime.

[spzb]

> coupled with incompetent IT project management

The UK Government have made a pig's ear of pretty much the whole of their Covid response precisely because they refuse to engage with anyone who might actually know what they're doing. Everything's been outsourced at great expense to private companies operating on a wing and a prayer basis. Millions of pounds and many weeks' of time early on in the pandemic was wasted building a bespoke app that anyone with any experience told them wouldn't work. They finally were forced into an embarrassing climbdown where they had to accept the Google/Apple solution that they'd previously dismissed as not good enough.

The only thing they've done well is the vaccine programme because they actually let the National Health Service get on with it instead of letting some big outsourcing company flounder about expensively.

[makomk]

Funny you should mention that. Literally the day that the UK rolled out the new app using the Google/Apple solution, the BBC suddenly forgot about the downsides of the old app and decided that its advantages over the new one were real after all. Even found a few experts to back them up, whereas before you'd think only the government considered it to have any advantage.

[mytailorisrich]

> There seems to be a bit of a "We're the government, so they'll have to do what we ask/tell" going on here I suspect

That's the case (they are the government, they are in control, not Apple or Google), and certainly it should have been the case considering the situation. But that would have required the government to show some backbone and to use the power at its disposal. Instead it seems that the issue has been politically controversial so that the government decided not to act decisively on track and trace apps overall.

This is continuing with the controversy over "vaccine passports".