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Comment by eznzt | Hacker News Reader

Not if they had enough servers and bandwidth.

This is an inefficient use of government money to in-source everything. If private industry can do something cheaper and more effective, use common sense.

At what point do you think that sovereignty outweighs price? I think that is the point that GF is on about.

There is a good case for some sort of in-sourcing when it comes to national systems. For example if, say, a Chinese diplomat toddled on over to you (let's say you are a US citizen and an important one) and asked you to use his country's foremost VPN solution for secure communications. Would you?

Now let's muddy the waters somewhat. Zoom? sounds a bit Anglo/Sax ... ish. It isn't of course. It also seems that Zoom forgot to encrypt their encrypted channels. lol.

There's more to security and stuff than cash. I do the boring old security thing for a living. It is boring but I like boring.

Of course sovereignty and overall data security should be considered. My point is that a blanket "no outsourcing" rule is daft and counterproductive.

Private industry by definition can't do something cheaper and more effectively because its goal is to make money, not to make a quality or cheap product.

If existing companies utilize cloud providers and CDNs rather than investing in their own in-house infra, doesn’t that signal to you that perhaps your analysis of the situation is flawed?

It’s possible the government is a big enough customer that they could get the necessary economy of scale to make it cost effective, but it also means that they’re going to need to develop a bespoke solution that all government services build on which itself is an expensive endeavor (and politically a liability since such a project can fail to deliver and just balloon in cost).

The government could rent our spare compute as a cloud provider, of course, to recapture expense. Then we can ask how dare the government spy on private citizen web traffic like that.

Let's imagine that I had to make a website that could host a million concurrent users once per year. What do you think is cheaper, me acquiring all of the hardware to scale to a million users and then leaving it idle 99.9% of the time, or outsource handling that peak traffic to someone who's already operating at the scale for it?

The UK government does not remotely need the same year-round capacity as a top-tier CDN.

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