Dutch gov't will only allow European company to operate DigiD platform (opens in new tab)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

France is a lot more socialist luckily.

When you are interacting with the government for official business, what purpose is there to hide one's identity? You can't exactly not fill in your name in your tax return.

For the non-government/private business however, it is indeed a matter of privacy. France rolled out a while ago the requirement to establish the user's age when accessing porn sites. I refuse to do that.

Why? It’s been around in the netherlands for a while and it’s extremely convenient, basically just functions as SSO for government apps.

I knew a fellow with the same idea about government id of any form. No driver's license, no social security card, no state id.

To say the least, he made some pretty serious compromises in life. He was a tattoo artist with no shop and effectively homeless when I knew him, if you were curious.

Anyway, sometimes the world moves on without you.

Yes, we need even more antisocial individualism!

For some reason the government isn't willing to pay software developer salaries. It would rather pay a company to pay them instead.

One important note: It's not the admin of the system that's in question here, that is government ran.

The company in question only provides cloud services, and has no access to any data.

> I just don't understand why the government won't consider funding it. It's a public infrastructure service at this point.

It has been 9 years since the last centrist ("purple") government in the Netherlands. 24 years since the last left-wing led government. Nothing more to it.

It's just decades of Neoliberal "outsource government tasks to the free market" policy. There really isn't any other reason; The Dutch government has multiple divisions which are quite good at IT. It could choose to do so at any moment, it just doesn't.

Voters just didn't care. The system worked fairly reliably. So they just kept voting for a very charismatic politician, regardless of the long term consequences.

> What's wrong with the government taking over admin of DigiD?

Because they're a government and they are therefore going to fuck it up.

>The goal of every country should be to foster a sovereign software flywheel

The very simple economic problem with this is that autarky does not increase aggregate output. Saying "I will do this myself", always requires the qualification "at the expense of what else that I'm not doing?"

The adaption to a reality of a balkanized world for small countries is, like Singapore does successfully, triangulate between large countries, specialize what you're good at, be pragmatic and flexible and strategically neutral which makes big powers compete for you without drawing hostility, rather than trying to become 'sovereign', which makes you poor and a target.

> Almost every country has amazing universities with software tracks.

Simply not true. It’s questionable what “best program” means for software engineering. It’s a hard craft to teach in classrooms and apprenticeship/mentoring model is reputable. Even if every country had such a system today (far from it) it wouldn’t produce devs with 10 years experience until 10 years from now.

> Governments should greatly favor products created by the students of their own universities.

Simply not true. Go with the best tool for the job. Favoritism for domestic industries is fatal in highly innovative industries. Even if your own product is better (American Gopher was far superior to European HTTP, American UNIX was superior to Finnish Linux, American Perl was superior to Dutch Python), adoption matters.

Looking backward it seems really bizarre to favor locals, doesn’t it?

The alternative is building the capacity to evaluate and mitigate risk.

I ve had exactly same idea for many years now, but apparently that's not as obvisous to others

Developing new software? Universities! Maintaining/migrating old software? Universities! IT counseling and advise? You won't believe it ... Unive okey i stop here you got the point

When EU ID is needed for Eurovision voting we can all act surprised by the change in rankings.

Yes.. their days of not taking the threat seriously certainly have come to a middle.

There is hope:

Thank you for raising this issue. We are aware that our current implementation does not yet work on GrapheneOS. This is a temporary situation we plan to resolve before this app goes public.

https://github.com/MinBZK/nl-wallet/issues/34#issuecomment-4...

Until then, I'd recommend every Dutch person (or probably every EU person, since this could also influence other wallets) to upvote/heart the initial request in that issue to show that there is serious demand for this.

Any network service with 24x7 availability and millions of users requires constant maintenance. Hardware has some lifetime and needs to be maintained and replaced. OS needs patching. Dependencies need security updates and, time to time, migrations to next major LTS update. Sometimes new requirements come from regulatory, that need development of new features. The skill set needs to be maintained. Support requests need to be served. Law enforcement may ask for some data.

Add to this hard digital sovereignty requirements: continuity of service must be guaranteed for decades. All this requires quite a special setup in which commercial entities are rather tolerated than welcomed, but they may still make more sense than a government agency so constrained by budget process that they cannot hire any decent engineer.

Why do you think its wild ? I find that easy to understand and grounded in facts.

Then they'll be in breach of contract. Lots of government contracts have a "no outsourcing" clause.

Yeah seriously if ADF gets elected do you cancel German contracts?