[fc417fc802]

It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top.

I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?

> Official second-level domains do not exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nl

[closewith]

That's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.

[djaro]

It exists, but the vast majority of government services dont use it (i.e. taxes are just done through belastingdienst.nl).

[closewith]

Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk).

Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.

[fc417fc802]

Ah. Just a blatant inaccuracy on wikipedia I take it. That does make a bit more sense.

[robin_reala]

Yep. gov.nl is in the PSL[1] and there are plenty of used subdomains (e.g. https://business.gov.nl/)

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

[djaro]

As far as I can tell .gov.nl is only used for pages aimed at i.e. expats and businesses. Most services dutch people use simply have a .nl page like the digital id or filing taxes.

[jurgenburgen]

This makes sense because gov is anglocentric and would make the URLs sound weird in non-English countries.

[rafram]

There’s no reason they couldn’t have picked a different second-level suffix. Spanish-speaking countries use e.g. .gob.mx, France uses .gouv.fr.

[closewith]

And overheid.nl is their government site for that reason.

[pjc50]

Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff.

Yes, this results in enshittification.

[AnthonyMouse]

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.

[fc417fc802]

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.

[danaris]

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...?

[fc417fc802]

I'd understand contracting a commercial provider to run the government infra, with extensive contractual obligations surrounding exactly how data is to be handled. What's wild to me is turning government bureaucrats loose to send and receive likely very sensitive information using the third party provider of their choice.

[reactordev]

Ah yes, the art of making things shitty.

https://youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ