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Comment by seb1204 | Hacker News Reader

I know this from sport events but often the lottery or prize draw are organised by external marketing companies. So likely this is one reason for not making it a subdomain.

The other is that Germans seem very bad at this kind of stuff. Why the heck would the application for the German passport or Ausweis be published by some random GmbH and not Bundesregierung.gov?

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But .gov are for American government sites, and Elon's friends (oh geez I loaded doge.gov, it looks so dodgy...), and I assume the assignment of the domain names under .gov is done by somebody in the federal government, if they haven't been DOGEed as well. If any country's government can get a .gov domain, I can imagine the hacking that could happen, similar to hackers managing to infiltrate Bangladesh's central bank and almost managing a heist, but for a typo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_Bank_robbery

At least for Switzerland the federal government puts its sites under the domain admin.ch . And the Cantons have their own domains, e.g. zh.ch for Zurich.

From what I've seen, Austria also does this pretty well, with everything being on xyz.gov.at. The problem I see for germany is that the principle of subsidiarity is taken very seriously here. Everything is decided at the lowest sensible level of government. Consequently, there are many very tiny local authorities that have to manage things independently and lack IT admins.

Majority of countries around the world uses .gov top domain along with country code to provide government services to their citizens.

> Why the heck would the application for the German passport or Ausweis be published by some random GmbH and not Bundesregierung.gov?

This way the government doesn't have to release information to the public (think FOIA) about it. Moving central part of government operation into a private GmbH wholly owned by the government has (sadly IMHO) become a somewhat common strategy for the government. Not just Governikus (the one with the passport) but also the Telematik (Health system) and probably some more.

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