> they hand it over to a highly competent government agency full of the world's best operational engineers.
Fantasyland. As soon as the profit motive disappears, you’ll have the DMV.
As an example, the “world’s best operational engineers” — what happens when one of those engineers isn’t world’s best anymore? Can you fire him/her? Because in government, it’s extremely hard to fire mediocrity. It’s hard to even fire for incompetence. You’ll have unions getting involved and it will quickly degrade to a public school level of tomfoolery. You’ll have strikes when those world’s best engineers want more money or more holidays. Just look at how good the French train system is — until there is a widespread transit strike, then the country grinds to a halt. I don’t want critical business processes in the hands of a public union that can shut it down whenever they feel offended. With a profit motive, there is a shared incentive to make things better — you provide the service, you continue to get paid. When a government agency employee gets paid regardless of outcome, there is no incentive or fear when a service gets slowed down or interrupted: their job is secure.
Having experienced public sector strikes in France on multiple occasions, there is no way I’d trust the infrastructure of the internet to be benevolently operated by a government entity.
Imagine the politics! Imagine people operating an e-commerce store selling sodas — sorry, but since we have a government mandate to reduce obesity, We are going to cut off your service. You run a porn site? We don’t like that, so we are going to cut off your service. You are running a website critical of our government/union/political party? We are going to slow you down. You don’t have correct diversity of your workforce? We are going to penalize your service.
As soon as you let politicians control something upon which you absolutely depend, you have given those politicians unlimited power. “Vote for us or your servers will go down.” “Agree to our demands or your business is toast.”
It’s scary to give government that power. If AWS goes down, a person will move their business somewhere else. But when the Government system goes down, there is no other options.
Governments can and should regulate, but they absolutely shouldn’t own. And, the regulation they do employ should have the sole purpose of ensuring competition can thrive. Look at how banking regulations have kneecapped the marijuana industry — now imagine that sort of power controlling the entire internet infrastructure.
We need more competition, not a socialized monopoly.