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Comment by John23832 | Hacker News Reader

Totally secondary, but we could solve this by not giving the revenue rights for pubic good (parking meters, expressways, etc) to private companies which then have random toll websites. Just saying.

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Interesting. I see what you mean. Limiting it to .gov domains would make this hard to do but that cat is out of the bag and, in practice, we're better served with an open bidding process.

However, I did find it painful just now to find who etimspayments.com is since they're using domain privacy even though they are the SF provider https://wmq.etimspayments.com/pbw/include/sanfrancisco/input...

I was just talking to a friend and he put in a CPRA request to find out which LLC provides that service so we'll know soon enough.

Would having an open bidding process preclude the use of .gov TLD?

Why couldn’t the highest bidder handle the payment and processing at e.g. tolls.gov?

I imagine the process of getting a .gov TLD and transferring it is currently arduous - perhaps because that .gov is a heavy hitter TLD. If so, local governments may lack the resources to put into place improvements for their constituents if blocked on that TLD. But if it is the case that the process for that is simple then what you say is reasonable.

He got back to me. It's Conduent State and Local Solutions.

Don't they already scam people by duplicating government websites?

Iunno, the EZ-Pass website looks designed a few decades ago.

Tables-for-layout the whole way down! (https://www.e-zpassny.com/en/home/index.shtml)

That’s called accessibility and backwards compatibility.

Honestly, yeah, it's kind of refreshing.

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