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Comment by motohagiography | Hacker News Reader

Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage. I'm skeptical of the intentions of authors at Jacobin though, as the only power they ever want to decentralize and redistribute always seems to be someone else's.

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> Governments can barely manage a website,

I know, right? I mean, let's just compare them with leading edge telecoms/internet companies like Verizon, or T-Mobile, who for sure can demonstrate to all of us how to manage a basic internet task like "manage a website". Right?

Hmm, wait. What's that I'm hearing from the crowd? Verizon can't even make their login process work reliably? Their website is full of dead links and quite a few circular link chains? T-Mobile, surely they must be better? Well, less problems logging in, but the chat feature is often present and non-functional, information is out of date, and they can't ship anything to any address not directly served by the USPS (even though they do not use the USPS).

There's more. I've observed the basic, almost unbelievable website incompetence from cell/mobile companies in the UK, Germany and Spain.

By contrast, paying my taxes to the state government of New Mexico has become a remarkably efficient and actually pleasant experience, and across the Atlantic, the wonder that is gov.uk continues to improve.

So yeah, happy enough to give government a chance, just like we apparently have to keep giving chances to private corporations to figure this stuff out.

> Governments can barely manage a website

"Governments" built most of the technology that the web relies upon today.

Well, sort of. They at least provided the incentive.

Government funding built it would be more appropriate. Government agencies (outside of intelligence) are usually bereft of technology competency.

> Government funding built it would be more appropriate

It's essentially the same thing - when tax money fund R&D with the explicit requirement that all results become publicly available.

Have you considered government incompetence is an intentional goal, at least in the US? One of the major political parties often works to hamstring government to hurt the other party in power. Both parties do it. It's a feature of first past the post politics, that negative sum tactics hurt your opponents more.

Could you provide a couple of examples that demonstrate what you consider to be the Democrats "hamstring[ing] government to hurt [the Republicans]" ? Thanks.

I could see interpreting the occasional government shut down as both parties "cooperating" in an attempt to spite each other, with the useful bits of government caught in the crossfire.

I'll bite:

I believe Trump declared by fiat that we should leave Afghanistan twice-- once at the beginning of his term, and again in an explicit written directive to the Pentagon after he lost the election in November. (That written directive was essentially ignored by the Pentagon.)

Where was Democratic support on those two occasions?

And if they didn't offer overwhelming unconditional support for Trump's position of complete withdrawal (which I believe they didn't), what possible reason could there be other than hurting Republicans?

Keep in mind that Dems still strongly support Biden's withdrawal, even given how botched the execution of it was.

The claim that the afghanistan withdrawal was botched has been subject to some criticism. It's certainly true that the (presumably) intelligence based assessment of what the Taliban would try and be able to do and how quickly was disastrously wrong. But compared to other large scale troop pullouts, it was actually remarkably smooth, especially for it's size and scale. The morality of leaving behind so many US collaborators is appalling, but the idea that the Biden administration had some total fuck up over there really isn't correct from everything I've read about. It's a POV widely held by Republicans, I suspect in part because a Republican president failed to even initiate the withdrawal, despite talking about it.

Anyway, I think that's largely orthogonal to the original point, which was more about what happens when you have one party whose political philosophy more or less dictates a smaller, less functional state and another that actively seeks to use the power of the state to accomplish things. "Lack of Democratic support" for Trump's spoken intent is real, but not really the same thing as, for example, the idea that public education is a mistake (widely held view among Republican primary voters).

> Governments can barely manage a website, so we may want to exercise some collective discernment before giving them the whole internet to manage.

Can't they or can't yours? UK's government websites are genuinely good, with amazing recommendations from their central IT about accessibility and what not. France's government websites are also pretty good, with SSO and digital services for lots of stuff. Estonia practically invented eGovernement.

Somehow gov.uk has a pretty amazing website.

It does, but it's the exception.

And yet the majority of research around modern technology was tax funded: semiconductors, optical networks, early computers, GSM, GPS, spread spectrum, satellites, aeronautics, weather research, CDs, LCDs, touch screens...

EDIT: I forgot a certain thing called Arpanet...

So, you would not be skeptical of the authors at Jacobin if they spent their days advocating for the decentralization and redistribution of their own power?

> the only power they ever want to decentralize and redistribute always seems to be someone else's.

Are you a Neofeudalist?

Please read the article. It isn’t a call for a government takeover of the internet.

It's a call to excise private ownership and replace it with government funding. That sounds like a "government takeover" to me.

"we need a publicly owned internet"

I don't know how to interpret than any other way. Publicly owned equals Government owned.

Wrong. The article very clearly provided alternatives.

The author's name is Marx and he's a PhD candidate in New Zealand: https://twitter.com/parismarx

You can't make this stuff up.

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