As a French person, I'm confused as to why DigiD is not a government-run project like FranceConnect is. I'm even more bewildered that an American company thought that they could take over the national identity management system of an European country, as if this was business as usual.

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Aaargh20318 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DigiD is a government project. It's owned and operated by Logius, which is a government-owned entity.

Logius outsourced the hosting and infrastructure to Solvinity.

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loupol 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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 ?

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Freak_NL 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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speleding an hour ago | parent [-]

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.

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Y-bar an hour ago | parent | next [-]

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!

	▲	pembrook 20 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Freak_NL an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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pyrale 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

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foresterre 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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/

	▲	tweetle_beetle 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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

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somewhatgoated 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

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boondongle an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Most National governments embraced globalism and free market solutioning. It worked both ways.

American Federal Systems also have European and Indian operators but it gets more restricted depending on what part of the system you're dealing with. Even then, the operators get it wrong.

Many "American" firms are being served by Irish, Bulgarian, and Dutch operators for example. When you get to Fedpod, the restrictions are usually tiered, not all or nothing. It's why US firms got caught with Chinese handling data.

The question isn't should Europe and even America clean it up - it's how much is legitimate national soverignty and how much is going to be straight mercantilism in the Cloud/SaaS sector.

	▲	PeterStuer 25 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		"Most National governments embraced globalism and free market" One could say globalists and free marketeers 'embraced' governments.

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navane 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm mostly bewildered that the Dutch government was ok with that, and it took way too much effort from the opposition to get them to pivot on this.

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irdc 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As a Dutch person, I'm not. Dutch administrators are traditionally wary of doing anything themselves that they could conceivably outsource to a commercial party. That also results in endless swarms of locus^H^H^H^H^Hconsultants feeding on our taxes.

I hate it, but what can you do, this is sadly what people here keep voting for.

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spockz 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I’m unaware of this kind of topic ever being one of the points in election time. This as opposed to topics like animal welfare. Sovereignty is only now becoming more visible as a votable topic.

Sadly, I don’t know of a way to influence how our government practices IT. Except maybe to work for Logius. And even then there will be the topic of funding.

	▲	microtonal 12 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’m unaware of this kind of topic ever being one of the points in election time. IT sovereignty may not have been a topic during elections, but it should be clear to anyone now that the VVD (political party that has been in most governments in the past decades) is a revolving door. When given a choice, they will always prefer letting the market do it/deregulate. This is not limited to IT. Banks, insurance companies, gas companies (Shell), etc. is where they work before they go into politics and/or work after they leave politics.

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yxhuvud 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Governments are not the only players needing working digital id, and sometimes banks are faster to build it.

	▲	spockz 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Banks have nothing to do with DigiD. There is eidas which allows you to attest your identity using a bank.

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carlosjobim 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The entire customs system of all of China used to be run by European foreigners. Not because of Western imperialism, but on invitation from the Chinese rulers, as a measure to combat corruption.

Some European countries right now have their currency printing and their passport printing outsourced to foreign nations.

These things aren't too unusual.

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boricj an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy. For example, offshoring passport printing to me sounds like a great opportunity for identity theft and document forgery by people outside of your jurisdiction.

I do kinda get the China customs system example though, only because if corruption is bad enough that it's a greater concern than opsec, then you're kinda hosed anyways.

	▲	lucumo 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> For France it certainly is, probably because of our stubborn focus on strategic autonomy. You're seeing people wake up to the threat now, with the opposition against Kyndryl and the Nexperia thing. Somewhat more controversially, I'm also worried about the French government owning large parts of the Dutch defense industry through Thales and Airbus. (And, to a lesser extent, German and Spanish governments.) Very little of the Dutch defense industry is still Dutch-owned. Only Damen comes to mind.

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expedition32 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The Netherlands is a small but very tasty fish in a pond infested with sharks.

None of the sharks ultimately ever managed to agree who gets to eat it- because whoever did would upset the balance between the sharks.

But China and America are mega sharks who don't care about balance and want to eat everything or die trying.

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outside1234 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Probably because it is wildly expensive to have a government directly run any tech project.

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