Good
Fuck the US and their bullshit capitalism. Do not trust them. They are the enemy, which feels wild to say but we’ve long memories, and education, and we’ve seen this before.
Has anyone coined a term like “digital imperialism”? I think it’s quite fitting.
I’m American and the US is my enemy too
Since the article is in Dutch, let me try to provide a little extra context:
- It’s not actually the company that runs DigiD, that’s Logius, who is part of the ministry of the interior.
- It’s about the cloud-hosting company that DigiD runs on. The DigiD code was open sourced, though it looks like the GitHub repository is now archived (https://github.com/MinBZK/woo-besluit-broncode-digid-app)
- It really is used for everything related to authentication with government services. Doing your taxes, scheduling an appointment with the city government for <insert anything>, scheduling a doctors appointment, getting a prescription refilled, on and on.
One wonders why the application “used for everything related to authentication with government services” runs on a Private Sector cloud.
I mean, it’s not as if a Digital Cloud is any more than a bunch of servers running somewhere with a direct connection to the Internet.
Then again, this is The Netherlands, which is has been ruled by a very Neoliberal right-wing party (in various coalitions) for over a decade so it makes sense that the government there would have even essential software for interacting with Public Services be operated by the Private Sector.
If its that core to the country maybe the govt should buy it
The company actually inquired, our government said no. That’s what you get when capitalists are at the wheel and expect “the market” will magically solve everything.
The title is a bit misleading by the way, it’s about the company that hosts the infrastructure, Solvinity. The application itself is built and maintained by a government agency called Logius.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t DigiD created by Logius, which is part of the “Interior Ministry” to roughly translate into English?
I didn’t had the time to go into that much detail, but that is correct. 🙂
Formal online authentication is apparently everything :p
As an American: Good!
Good.
It’s always funny (and sad) when someone from the USA points out that almost all internet services are US owned, not European, it sounds like they did all the work developing the modern internet, and while Americans really did a lot, they also bought a lot of services created in other countries.
The Web was born in that well known American institution, CERN, invented by that well known American citizen, Tim Berners-Lee.
Turns out the company in questioned already was bought by a UK company, so already isn’t even Dutch (or even EU anymore). But at least it’s not American (the concern is that American laws potentially give the American government a lot of access to the Dutch citizen data). Companies owned by companies. It gets complicated.
As an American I love this!
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