It's like AMI trying to blackmail Jeff Bezos, but having all of their sites hosted with AWS ....
What happens when it makes business sense for Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook to start charging nation states a license fee for offering their services into their country and all the government services rely on their cloud offerings?
It's the Zeroth law of the Economy. There's economic activity when you aren't getting shot at. If Google starts making sufficient waves that enough diplomatic pressure can be put on their host country to start tightening the thumbscrews, Google will be faced with a situation where suddenly a lot of it's worth and value start to disappear. If they start having to hire lawyers left and right due to scrutiny by the government or other governments, it becomes a less attractive asset to the market, and opens room for intrepid disruptors to replace their services.
Google has 'won' by being willing to play ball. Once hard ball starts being played, make no mistake. Google will get tipped.
...and if it doesn't, God save us all from the paths that leads to. I'm pretty sure they won't be pretty.
Google do have the mind share though, can you imagine trying to explain to Aunty Robyn that you have to type duckduckgo.com into the search bar now? and that she cant google it anymore?
Because you thumb your nose at nation-states at your peril.
In fact, it's less user-hostile than most commercial sites.
Why is that?
* Disclaimer - I'm British
I don't think it's the case that the government is simply unable to do something like this, I just think they don't provide the right incentives like competitive pay and bonuses.
In the private sector, say in finance, if you're good and you work for the firm for awhile you could get promoted to managing director and make anywhere from a million to ten million in bonuses for the year. If you're a productive manager in government, you don't really get paid much more than anyone else.
The main benefit that government provides its employees is good benefits (healthcare, pensions) and job stability. It's unlikely that you will ever get fired unless for some very gross misconduct.
I think this incentive system attracts the wrong kind of people into government: those who just want a stable paycheck instead of those driven to produce value.
If we just raised government salaries or if the government gave out significant performance bonuses, the government would work a lot better and be much more efficient.
I do get your underlying point, but gov.uk has been near-universally lauded as “doing it right” - I think it’s important to take it as an example of “this is actually possible”, rather than brushing it off.
It would be rather disingenuous to heap any level of universal praise upon gov.uk projects, especially considering the high profile foobars reported on a regular basis. This is just one fresh example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/02/08/ir35_tax_check_test...
Despite having a common UI/UX for the front-end, most of the development is conducted by different suppliers e.g. Capita, Cap Gemini, Fujitsu et al.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/strategic-supplie...