Hacker News Reader

Comment by utopkara | Hacker News Reader

Many will only read the image captions and will miss this buried "info" bit:

"Conduent, in another twist, has begun competing with the start-up. The business services outsourcer, which has $6 billion in yearly revenue, introduced its own smartphone app last year. Conduent’s entry, ConnectEBT, has significantly fewer reviews and lower ratings on the Google and Apple app stores than Propel’s FreshEBT."

View on HN

I came across Conduent's web portal for checking your balance, only to be greeted with this lovely error message that demonstrates just how accessible and up-to-date this company is:

> You're using Chrome 66. Please use Internet Explorer or Firefox version 4 or above.

In most cases, I would agree that Conduent is within their rights to build their own data stream for their product, and cut off a competitor. But, when your product is the redistribution of taxpayer dollars, doing so turns into a government sponsored monopoly.

I'm happy you agree, but how is being a monopoly better than being a government sponsored monopoly? They result in the same outcome.

I think the difference is that they are using public funds and public data which they are withholding. Google is/was a natural monopoly due to sheer technological advantage however someone can (and sort of has) built a competing product. There is no way to build a competing product in this case because it relys on data that is being withheld, it is doubly annoying because that data is (or should be) public and is funded by taxpayer dollars.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com