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Comment by loupol | Hacker News Reader

That's a bit better but it shifts the question:

Why did they not mandate national (or at least EU-based) hosting and infra ?

It feels a bit insane in retrospect for such a critical digital service ?

It's an unfortunate Dutch way of doing things. The firm believe that the market will solve it if you have a contract that says thing will be solved. Write a tender, pick the cheapest party, trust in contracts, hope it won't break before you (the external contractor pushing for it) move on in a few months time.

The people who pointed out that none of the moving parts of DigiD should have been outsourced were ignored until the tide shifted this year.

I'm honestly surprised the government decided to intervene. The usual method is to keep on believing in the signed piece of paper until the shit hits the fan (like with the Fyra high speed trains) — never mind that the US (where the buyer is from) is not likely to give a toss about those pieces of paper if they need something from our data.

It's important to add the context that whenever our government tries to do something by themselves it ends up late and severely over budget.

So you have to weigh the risks of outsourcing to the risk of the whole thing becoming very late and very expensive. The risks around outsourcing are something further down the line, the risks of everything becoming expensive and late are something that will give the responsible politician a headache now.

Outsourced stuff is late and expensive too, just not directly the responsibility of the minister or secretary of state because of the magic piece of paper in between.

IT is hardly something we need to do occasionally, so build up a department that can do it (not just write up huge reports about what it should do and outsource, like Logius) and invest in the people that will work there (retaining them as much as possible). Give a big middle finger to consultants, and listen to the tech experts. Build boring stuff that works instead of a new app every month.

It's not impossible in theory, and cheaper in the long run. It's impossible because asshats who would actually benefit from left and centre politics keep voting right-wing parties in to power.

I agree that the government should do IT in house, ideally, because it's a core business for them. The reality is that it is very hard to attract and retain good IT staff on a government salary. The people who need to manage all that in a cost-effective way are especially hard to find.

So we end up with expensive consultants doing the work. Consultants have the wrong incentive. They don't want to stay in one place to long because it looks bad on their resume and overruns mean more money for them.

So really, I can see why a seasoned politician chooses the safest option for him. By the time an overrun occurs he will have moved on to the next job. I don't think left or right-wing politics has much to do with this dynamic. How will a left-wing politician magically get capable IT staff that higher paying industry can't even get enough of?

By attempting to? There is a huge and I would argue growing number of talented people who are dismayed by what the tech industry has become and would actively want to work on values aligned projects

I work (and always has) in the private sector and we can be even better at ending up over budget and be even later at delivery. I don’t believe for a moment that the government has a monopoly on underachieving!

The problem isn’t public or private, it’s incentives.

If the private company is granted a defacto monopoly, it doesn’t matter that they’re a “private” company, they will have the same incentive and accountability problem.

What we know for certain though: Government taking over something is definitionally a monopoly and 99.99% of government employees are not subject to the accountability mechanism of elections.

Historically, the largest boondoggles of waste have always come from government, given they can legally hold a gun to your head and take 50% of everyones money to fund their “projects.” Private companies can’t take your money by force, unless being given those contracts by government. So again, the the incentive issue fundamentally arises from an entity being entitled to gather assets using violence rather than voluntary exchange.

> accountability mechanism of elections.

Are you seriously suggesting that electing civil servants would be an improvement?

Expat/kennismigrant here - it's same "ends up late and over budget" for literally every country (and private businesses).

What Dutch government/politicians seems to be "ahead" compared to other countries - is combination of narrow or short sightedness and (over)correction trough rules, laws and regulations.

Like giving subsidies and tax breaks for electrical cars, rooftop solar panels and mandating household switch from gas (LPG and such) to electric heating and cooking. And ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

More of the same with stuff like 30% tax rule for expats, which was originally introduced as cost saving measures because actually doing bookkeeping for expatriate expenses was costing government more money. But then more recently expat tax breaks have been reduced and phased out "because cost saving". Meanwhile employers have trouble finding highly skilled workers. And we're limiting numbers of foreign students in universities (by forcing them to do it in Dutch instead of English).

Some Bulgarians cheated/defrauded Dutch tax returns or such - and "solution" was ML/AI reviewing things - but it turned out to be broken/biased and (ab)used for other things - leading to the whole toeslag scandal and government resigning.

Same for nitrogen vs lack of housing... And many more.

> ignoring industry professionals for decades saying the distribution network won't scale.

Who says that? The British National Grid says the opposite. Or is it specifically the Dutch network that would not handle the changing requirements? If so what makes it special?

The Dutch electric grid is owned and operated by a few companies that are heavily regulated by the ACM (Authority for Consumer and Markets). Those companies have been wanting to invest in upgrading the grid for many years, but the ACM refused them permission as they considered it unnecessary investments that would drive up the costs for consumers.

Now we’re fucked because the government has been stimulating electric cars, heat pumps, etc. to meet climate goals, which increases the load on the electric grid which is now unable to keep up with demand. Something everyone saw coming except for the ACM.

Are your heat pumps replacing gas? Because if not then replacing resistive heating with a heat pump results in less load on the grid not more. My heat pump outputs 7 kW for an input of less than 3 kW.

> It's important to add the context that whenever our government tries to do something by themselves it ends up late and severely over budget.

This is, however, true for any value of "our government".

> Why did they not mandate national (or at least EU-based) hosting and infra ?

They did, and they moved to block the acquisition of the local company handling it. What's unclear in the article?

They didn’t

> Currently, DigiD is partially managed by Solvinity, a company owned by a British investor

Britain is neither local nor in the EU

The company is incorporated in the netherlands, and the workers are there. The corporate structure means the shareholder can't do whatever they want.

I don't see why they should bother with who invests in it, when they have the power to do what they just did and block the acquisition.

The "local" company is already UK owned though, so at most "European", not national or EU.

What I find strange is that the Dutch government does have its own datacenters, e.g. ODC-Noord (1), but they're still looking to outsource the hosting even after the current contract ends in 2027.

(1) https://www.odc-noord.nl/

I suspect that most government departments see data centers as a liability and are very happy to outsource to the big providers, apart perhaps from the ones hosting stuff they don't really want you to know about.

It's always better to be able to blame a supplier for something going wrong if you're a senior leader or politician. For some reason, if it does happen no one has to resign.

There is loads of UK Critical National Infrastructure on AWS, probably Azure too. And the Home Office put up £10 million tender to shut down an old data centre not that long ago without a confirmed replacement - https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/018193-2024

Seems like governments, at least ones of the size under discussion here, are big enough to have a general services agency run a consolidated data center for the rest of the government, allowing individual agencies/departments get similar benefits of outsourcing to a commercial entity.

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