[boricj]

As a French person, I'm confused as to why DigiD is not a government-run project like FranceConnect is. I'm even more bewildered that an American company thought that they could take over the national identity management system of an European country, as if this was business as usual.

[Aaargh20318]

DigiD is a government project. It's owned and operated by Logius, which is a government-owned entity.

Logius outsourced the hosting and infrastructure to Solvinity.

[loupol]

That's a bit better but it shifts the question:

Why did they not mandate national (or at least EU-based) hosting and infra ?

It feels a bit insane in retrospect for such a critical digital service ?

[Freak_NL]

It's an unfortunate Dutch way of doing things. The firm believe that the market will solve it if you have a contract that says thing will be solved. Write a tender, pick the cheapest party, trust in contracts, hope it won't break before you (the external contractor pushing for it) move on in a few months time.

The people who pointed out that none of the moving parts of DigiD should have been outsourced were ignored until the tide shifted this year.

I'm honestly surprised the government decided to intervene. The usual method is to keep on believing in the signed piece of paper until the shit hits the fan (like with the Fyra high speed trains) — never mind that the US (where the buyer is from) is not likely to give a toss about those pieces of paper if they need something from our data.

[speleding]

It's important to add the context that whenever our government tries to do something by themselves it ends up late and severely over budget.

So you have to weigh the risks of outsourcing to the risk of the whole thing becoming very late and very expensive. The risks around outsourcing are something further down the line, the risks of everything becoming expensive and late are something that will give the responsible politician a headache now.

[Y-bar]

I work (and always has) in the private sector and we can be even better at ending up over budget and be even later at delivery. I don’t believe for a moment that the government has a monopoly on underachieving!

[pembrook]

The problem isn’t public or private, it’s incentives.

If the private company is granted a defacto monopoly, it doesn’t matter that they’re a “private” company, they will have the same incentive and accountability problem.

What we know for certain though: Government taking over something is definitionally a monopoly and 99.99% of government employees are not subject to the accountability mechanism of elections.

Historically, the largest boondoggles of waste have always come from government, given they can legally hold a gun to your head and take 50% of everyones money to fund their “projects.” Private companies can’t take your money by force, unless being given those contracts by government. So again, the the incentive issue fundamentally arises from an entity being entitled to gather assets using violence rather than voluntary exchange.

[techcode]

Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).

What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.

Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).

Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.

Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.

[ninalanyon]

> ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

Who says that? The British National Grid says the opposite. Or is it specifically the Dutch network that would not handle the changing requirements? If so what makes it special?

[pseudohadamard]

> It's important to add the context that whenever our government tries to do something by themselves it ends up late and severely over budget.

This is, however, true for any value of "our government".

[Freak_NL]

Outsourced stuff is late and expensive too, just not directly the responsibility of the minister or secretary of state because of the magic piece of paper in between.

IT is hardly something we need to do occasionally, so build up a department that can do it (not just write up huge reports about what it should do and outsource, like Logius) and invest in the people that will work there (retaining them as much as possible). Give a big middle finger to consultants, and listen to the tech experts. Build boring stuff that works instead of a new app every month.

It's not impossible in theory, and cheaper in the long run. It's impossible because asshats who would actually benefit from left and centre politics keep voting right-wing parties in to power.

[speleding]

I agree that the government should do IT in house, ideally, because it's a core business for them. The reality is that it is very hard to attract and retain good IT staff on a government salary. The people who need to manage all that in a cost-effective way are especially hard to find.

So we end up with expensive consultants doing the work. Consultants have the wrong incentive. They don't want to stay in one place to long because it looks bad on their resume and overruns mean more money for them.

So really, I can see why a seasoned politician chooses the safest option for him. By the time an overrun occurs he will have moved on to the next job. I don't think left or right-wing politics has much to do with this dynamic. How will a left-wing politician magically get capable IT staff that higher paying industry can't even get enough of?

[pyrale]

> Why did they not mandate national (or at least EU-based) hosting and infra ?

They did, and they moved to block the acquisition of the local company handling it. What's unclear in the article?

[somewhatgoated]

They didn’t

> Currently, DigiD is partially managed by Solvinity, a company owned by a British investor

Britain is neither local nor in the EU

[pyrale]

The company is incorporated in the netherlands, and the workers are there. The corporate structure means the shareholder can't do whatever they want.

I don't see why they should bother with who invests in it, when they have the power to do what they just did and block the acquisition.

[foresterre]

The "local" company is already UK owned though, so at most "European", not national or EU.

What I find strange is that the Dutch government does have its own datacenters, e.g. ODC-Noord (1), but they're still looking to outsource the hosting even after the current contract ends in 2027.

(1) https://www.odc-noord.nl/

[tweetle_beetle]

I suspect that most government departments see data centers as a liability and are very happy to outsource to the big providers, apart perhaps from the ones hosting stuff they don't really want you to know about.

It's always better to be able to blame a supplier for something going wrong if you're a senior leader or politician. For some reason, if it does happen no one has to resign.

There is loads of UK Critical National Infrastructure on AWS, probably Azure too. And the Home Office put up £10 million tender to shut down an old data centre not that long ago without a confirmed replacement - https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/018193-2024

[FateOfNations]

Seems like governments, at least ones of the size under discussion here, are big enough to have a general services agency run a consolidated data center for the rest of the government, allowing individual agencies/departments get similar benefits of outsourcing to a commercial entity.

[carlosjobim]

The entire customs system of all of China used to be run by European foreigners. Not because of Western imperialism, but on invitation from the Chinese rulers, as a measure to combat corruption.

Some European countries right now have their currency printing and their passport printing outsourced to foreign nations.

These things aren't too unusual.

[amaccuish]

> Some European countries right now have their currency printing and their passport printing outsourced to foreign nations.

Whilst I still agree with your premise that this is not wise, I should point out that, for example UK passports, whilst produced in Poland, are personalised in the UK. Not that that helps the UK case since the personalisation is done by Thales...

[boricj]

For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy. For example, offshoring passport printing to me sounds like a great opportunity for identity theft and document forgery by people outside of your jurisdiction.

I do kinda get the China customs system example though, only because if corruption is bad enough that it's a greater concern than opsec, then you're kinda hosed anyways.

[lucumo]

> For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy.

You're seeing people wake up to the threat now, with the opposition against Kyndryl and the Nexperia thing.

Somewhat more controversially, I'm also worried about the French government owning large parts of the Dutch defense industry through Thales and Airbus. (And, to a lesser extent, German and Spanish governments.)

Very little of the Dutch defense industry is still Dutch-owned. Only Damen comes to mind.

[boricj]

The days of nationalized French defense companies and state arsenals have been over for quite a while. Assuming I didn't make any mistakes:

GIAT was privatized, then renamed to Nexter, then merged with German KMW to form European KNDS and now it's about to do an IPO.

All of the French aerospace industry (including missiles) bar Dassault and Thales is inside Airbus.

Arquus was bought by Belgian John Cockerill.

I could probably cite more if I dug deeper, but while we still have French defense companies like Dassault, Naval Group and Thales, a fair amount of our defense industry is no longer exclusively French owned.

And if the French government or owner starts getting uppity, you could always take a page from the Swedes and how they Kockums the shit out of ThyssenKrupp.

[lucumo]

The French state owns a 26.6% of the shares in Thales, with 36.4% of the voting rights. The Dassault family has another 30% of the voting rights. A combined controlling share.

The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

The situation with Airbus is a little more healthy, with the French government share being much lower (11%), and the German (11%) and Spanish (4%) governments balancing it out a bit. Airbus is also a smaller part of Dutch defense. Still, none of those governments is Dutch.

The fact that the French government owns more of the Dutch defense industry than the Dutch government is a problem.

[boricj]

> The Dassault family has very close ties with the French government and defense industry. There's no doubt in my mind that if the French government gets serious and says "Jump!" Dassault would just ask "How high?"

I'll push back on that point.

The FCAS program was originally conceived as a French-German joint political initiative by Macron and Merkel. The NGF plane within it has been dead in the water for years because Airbus and Dassault can't work out their disagreements. It's a conflict between two industrial companies that's blocking forward progress, with the Airbus and Dassault CEOs duking it out across press releases and shareholder meetings.

If Dassault was a French state puppet, Macron would've strong-armed Dassault into working with Airbus on this €100 billion project by now. Yet, the French President seems to know better than to try and do that. One does not get to be basically the only major private independent defense company in a famously nationalized French defense industry during the Cold War without managing to hold the French state at arm's length, especially during the nationalization years of Mitterand's presidency.

Though your concerns about ownership of the Dutch defense industry are certainly valid, I don't see how the European defense industry could have completely avoided consolidation after the end of the Cold War, given the budget cuts to defense. The Americans went much further on that front and nowadays the lack of internal competition is causing them all kinds of problems for them.

[lucumo]

I looked into the other names you've mentioned.

KNDS is certainly planning to IPO later this year, but with only 20% of the stock free floating. The plans are that the French and German governments will own 40% each.

Arquus is not owned by "Belgian John Cockerill", it is owned by the John Cockerill Group, which in turn is owned by Frenchman Bernard Serin.

Naval Group: 62% owned by the French Government, 25% owned by Thales.

While it's certainly not wholly government-owned, it really doesn't look like a private sector either. For some companies the publicness looks a lot like a fig leaf.

[expedition32]

The Netherlands is a small but very tasty fish in a pond infested with sharks.

None of the sharks ultimately ever managed to agree who gets to eat it- because whoever did would upset the balance between the sharks.

But China and America are mega sharks who don't care about balance and want to eat everything or die trying.

[boondongle]

Most National governments embraced globalism and free market solutioning. It worked both ways.

American Federal Systems also have European and Indian operators but it gets more restricted depending on what part of the system you're dealing with. Even then, the operators get it wrong.

Many "American" firms are being served by Irish, Bulgarian, and Dutch operators for example. When you get to Fedpod, the restrictions are usually tiered, not all or nothing. It's why US firms got caught with Chinese handling data.

The question isn't should Europe and even America clean it up - it's how much is legitimate national soverignty and how much is going to be straight mercantilism in the Cloud/SaaS sector.

[PeterStuer]

"Most National governments embraced globalism and free market"

One could say globalists and free marketeers 'embraced' governments.

[navane]

I'm mostly bewildered that the Dutch government was ok with that, and it took way too much effort from the opposition to get them to pivot on this.

[justinclift]

Meanwhile Palantir is getting in tight with the UK government, to the point of managing the UK's firearms, explosives, and poisons licensing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48403043

[irdc]

As a Dutch person, I'm not. Dutch administrators are traditionally wary of doing anything themselves that they could conceivably outsource to a commercial party. That also results in endless swarms of locus^H^H^H^H^Hconsultants feeding on our taxes.

I hate it, but what can you do, this is sadly what people here keep voting for.

[spockz]

I’m unaware of this kind of topic ever being one of the points in election time. This as opposed to topics like animal welfare. Sovereignty is only now becoming more visible as a votable topic.

Sadly, I don’t know of a way to influence how our government practices IT. Except maybe to work for Logius. And even then there will be the topic of funding.

[microtonal]

I’m unaware of this kind of topic ever being one of the points in election time.

IT sovereignty may not have been a topic during elections, but it should be clear to anyone now that the VVD (political party that has been in most governments in the past decades) is a revolving door. When given a choice, they will always prefer letting the market do it/deregulate. This is not limited to IT. Banks, insurance companies, gas companies (Shell), etc. is where they work before they go into politics and/or work after they leave politics.

[spockz]

Oh sure. This applies to almost all politicians, not just those VVD. They are more sought after because they actually have been in government long. (And indeed, maybe it is even a vicious circle.)

However, election topics never were about this kind of meta behaviour and more of the topics. Many people voted for PvdA, GroenLinks, D66, and other parties. Even for the more right wing ones than VVD.

The thing is that topics these days are so broad that they do not revolve around left/right or liberal/conservative anymore.

On topic, privatisation could perfectly have been paired with an European ideal from the beginning. In fact, before all these shenanigans with the one currently called president started, it was still believed we as “the West” were one hegemony. In that light, things were privatised along the ideals. It is only lately that the ideals changed to include more country sovereignty.

[outside1234]

Probably because it is wildly expensive to have a government directly run any tech project.

[yxhuvud]

Governments are not the only players needing working digital id, and sometimes banks are faster to build it.

[spockz]

Banks have nothing to do with DigiD. There is eidas which allows you to attest your identity using a bank.

[wolvoleo]

The neoliberal party VVD love involving private businesses in government operations, they considered that a win-win.

France is a lot more socialist luckily.