I agree with this in theory but in practice it would be unrealistic and honestly a misuse of government funds for them to reinvent and maintain a fully in-housed stack for all of its digital services.
The rest you list are costs orthogonal to this service.
> But asking the customer to pay google to query the data is crossing the line?
Yes.
Why are you arguing for a US government agency to require its citizens to pay for access to data which they have already paid for by funding said agency?
Well, no, a customer has choices for most of those, because the government isn't hosting the data exclusively with a private vendor that charges the customer for access, providing an exclusive franchise to that vendor.
That was what was suggested upthread.
Requiring the user to have certain capacities to access data, where those capacities are provided by a number of competing vendors (and some by free, gratis and/or libre sources) is a very different thing.
> So are you ok with some chinese APP company making 50 crappy NPS themed apps and having taxpayers pay for the backend?
I will make that trade every day of the week if it means access continues to be through a standard protocol (HTTP) and not beholden to any particular vendor.
Why would someone who just wants to access the data need to pay for AWS? And the rest can be avoided by using a library PC & open source software. Or more likely, are already things almost everyone has on hand anyway.
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. It's an old saying meaning nothing is really free. If you aren't paying money, you're paying some other way.
You really aren’t. You’re talking like someone who is willfully ignorant of the decades of internet history that have preceded this conversation.
People have quite literally died over the issue of public access to public data. It’s quite an important belay point to arrest the deterioration of the spirit of open networks.
The federal government pays Comcast to provide internet to low income households. And you can actually access this data on any old brand of laptop, or the desktop computers provided for use in most jurisdictions, and do not have to pay for any development tools to do so.
My second hand laptop isn't apple, my host is a raspberry pi, not AWS. I don't use comcast - I have a wide choice of providers including free ones (at my local library), and I've never paid for a development tool