Except the tech companies are among the politicians’ biggest “donors”.
cybersandwich@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Another way to encourage interoperability is to use the government to hold out a carrot in addition to the stick. Through government procurement laws, governments could require any company providing a product or service to the government to not interfere with interoperability. President Lincoln required standard tooling for bullets and rifles during the Civil War, so there’s a long history of requiring this already. If companies don’t want to play nice, they’ll lose out on some lucrative contracts, “but no one forces a tech company to do business with the federal government.”
That’s actually a very interesting idea. This benefits the govt as much as anyone else too. It reduces switching costs for govt tech.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 day ago
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Except the tech companies are among the politicians’ biggest “donors”.
Public cloud computing companies that want to host government IT workloads still have to be Fedramp compliant. Doesn’t matter how much their donors pay, if they aren’t Fedramp compliant they can’t bid for the work.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 17 hours ago
I dunno what “Fedramp compliant” means? Presumably Apple and Google aren’t bidding for these contracts, which are the ones with the power to change the industry.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I dunno what “Fedramp compliant” means?
Its the whole point of this point in this thread. A set of standards the company has to meet to be able to do government work.
Presumably Apple and Google aren’t bidding for these contracts, which are the ones with the power to change the industry.
Google is, so is Microsoft as is Amazon which is also the point of this post. They had to meet the security and interoperability standards to get the government work. No amount of donor money allows a company to bypass Fedramp compliance for this work.
AustralianSimon@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah but donations can help make procurement tenders slightly in favour of donors. Or get inside scoop so they have time to be ready.
partial_accumen@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Donors would still have to meet the Fedramp compliance standards. So this supports Doctorow’s point.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 18 hours ago
It’s easy to think of tech as being companies that primarily produce electronics or operate information services, but that’s not the case. Every company uses (and often creates) technology in various forms that benefit from standards and interoperation.
Connected devices benefit from standardized Wi-Fi. Cars benefit from standardized fuel- both in ICE (octane ratings, pumps) and electric (charging connectors, protocols). It even applies to companies that make simple molded plastic, because the molds can be created/used at many factories, including short-term contract manufacturing.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 17 hours ago
I don’t know what any of that has to do with what I said.
Nollij@sopuli.xyz 16 hours ago
My point is that every company is a tech company.
circuscritic@lemmy.ca 12 hours ago
DoD already started this with their Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA).
And I agree, the government should use its power to force interoperable and open standards wherever possible and relevant.
Benjaben@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Can confirm, I’ve worked for a company doing govt contract work and I really don’t know what it’d take for us to have walked away. They can dictate whatever terms they like and still expect to find plenty of companies happy to bid for contracts I think.
errer@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
It’s because they pay big dollars for comparatively little work with little validation of the quality of said work.
Benjaben@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
That hasn’t been quite my experience. For one thing, they cap their pay and don’t (can’t) negotiate like a private client. So generally less money per given project.
Comparatively little work and little validation also wasn’t my experience but I do get the sense it used to be more common, and it did feel like the experience I had was in some sense a reaction to previous contractors taking advantage.
scarabic@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Did you also have a robustly enshittified consumer business?
I’m thinking of his classic users —> advertisers —> shareholders model and struggling to come up with companies that have that model but also thrive on government contracts.
Yelp is a pretty classic case of enshittification. What government contracts do they have?
aesthelete@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Isn’t yelp a pretty easily replaceable thing?
They built a reputation by being one of the first in the space, but they’ve squandered that reputation and I’m pretty sure someone else could start up a competing “reviews” product.
I’d like to have one that actually showed the history of things like restaurants, because if the head chef leaves and the reviews have gone to shit it turns out that the reviews since the new chef are much more relevant than the 1000+ 5 star reviews of the food of the old guy.
I’m not sure how you’d protect against enshittification long-term. But I think one of the things that has largely poisoned the spirit of the Internet in general is that everything is always about a “sustainable business model” and “scaling” before anyone even dreams of just writing something up and seeing if they can get it to go popular.
iopq@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
Google maps is already good enough as a replacement. In fact in some countries it’s the best review aggregator
Benjaben@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
That’s fair, and government work can feel kind of like its own parallel business ecosystem in some ways. Sort of like how most of us think of the shops and businesses that are visible to us but not the massive B2B ecosystem just under the surface.
But I think the hope is that gov can standardize and define a certain net positive thing, and use its contracts to start requiring that thing, slowly making it more widespread and therefore common. Ideally the kinks get ironed out over time, and eventually it’s in a state where you can make the leap and start to require it be in place for any application / service above a certain user count.
Bit pie in the sky, but we should be at least trying to find ways to use govt to improve our situation. Things at policy level that don’t require chronically status quo politicians to vote in our best interests.
scarabic@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
I’ve had to implement wave after wave of compliance with European laws in the last several years. We tend to just comply with something like GDPR everywhere because that’s simpler and it’s a best practice. But without the teeth of legislation we’d never bother. There’s always too much to do. I would have a hard time doing something that’s better for consumers but takes a lot of effort or might even undermine our ability to monetize as aggressively as we choose to. Not without those teeth. Not a chance. Even with teeth, tech companies often find some shitty way to meet the minimum bar but really do nothing. We must offer an API? Okay. It has almost nothing in it, but enough to say we did something. We’d never stand up an API that competitors or scammers could benefit from.