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Comment by bhauer | Hacker News Reader

I think in the short-term the strategy is this from the article:

> Or ... block all the IP addresses of Google App Engine, at the risk of blocking many applications. having nothing to do with tracking.

Anyone hosting legitimate apps in the Google ecosystsm is indirectly complicit in this and at least for my personal network, I have no concern with blocking Google App Engine holistically.

Additionally, I think it's important to hurt Google as much as possible for escalating in this way. Widespread blocking of GAE may seem extreme but it's also arguably warranted.

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The thing is that you can host the server container also in AWS https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/deploy-server-side-googl... or Azure https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/server-side-tagging-azur...

I have no concern with blocking Google App Engine holistically

Unfortunately, it seems that more and more government web sites rely on Google services to function. And there's no replacement for those.

How can it be legal for a government to make increasingly core services depend on these amoral, for profit monsters?

I’m not sure if this is a serious question, but what would this imaginary law say?

The government can only do business with companies who aren’t in it for the money?

The US government isn't shy about adding rules for its contractors. It should be trivial for them to demand (or provide) dedicated IPs for their sites. Then they won't get caught up in the IP address blocking of GCP.

The big tech companies have all built out lobbying capabilities; such a law would end up helping big tech and harming small companies because the big companies would be involved in authoring the law and would be contributing to the sponsors and committee chairs and members to get their favorable language included. And it would all be legal and business as usual.

They don't have to be laws. It's something that Biden can just add into every RFP the US government puts otu.

But no, typically things like that don't hurt small companies.

Realistically, Congress could in fact mandate that government website implementations must be transferable between software vendors. That’s both technically feasible and in line with past government requirements for hardware procurement.

How about that government services must be built by the government?

Yes, I feel the same, at least for a lot of things. Certainly, all externally facing websites should be designed and maintained by gov't staff.

From time to time, HN features high quality UK gov't websites. In the last five years, the UK gov't has made dramatic strides on "digital gov't" initiatives that benefit regular citizens. As I understand, most of those sites are built and maintained by gov't employees. This runs counter to the normal, all-prevailing attitude in UK that "any gov't is too much gov't" (or "any gov't that does not directly benefit me...").

Brit here. On your last point, there is no such widespread attitude in the UK towards government. We are historically conservative, but not libertarian. Don't forget two of the most famous and loved British institutions are the BBC and the NHS. I'm not saying such attitudes don't exist, because they do, but it's not "all-prevailing" by any stretch.

I think it's a typo/autocorrect and they meant US at the last instance instead of UK.

The Conservatives want to privatise the BBC and the NHS though - abolishing the BBC licensing fee is a recent move, and steps to privatise the NHS have been repeatedly popular among politicians over the last decade.

The trouble is, they're mostly Microsoft and either Azure or AWS behind the scenes. The UK government as a whole seems to love Microsoft. I just worry it will be out of the frying pan and into the fire...

You have to draw a line somewhere with that logic, otherwise you'd have governments running their own fabs.

I'm fully in favour of governments doing everything from hosting up ( hosting, design, dev), with as much as possible open source.

For instance the French government fares well on this front, with most government services being developed in-house, and many parts are open source; in emergencies specific services were delegated to third parties ( e.g. vaccine bookings) so it isn't taken to a religious NIH level. However hosting is delegated to commercial entities.

I would like that law. However, they would have to pay wages and offer working conditions, that actually attract good developers and they would have to stop outsourcing everything. Outsourcing everything is also a problem with otherwise qualified engineers unfortunately. The big picture long term consequences are unpleasant.

> but what would this imaginary law say?

IANAL, but how about something like, "Government services offered via WWW must not contact commercial servers and must be fully usable with non-JS browsers."

The military-industrial complex would like to have a word.

Use two browsers. One where you don't block tracking and can access government and make purchases on shopping sites, and one tracking is blocked and JavaScript is turned off.

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