It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top.

I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the countries pushing digital IDs?

> Official second-level domains do not exist.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.nl

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pjc50 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff.

Yes, this results in enshittification.

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closewith 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's the most common approach globally. Like most countries, the Dutch Government use .gov.nl.

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djaro 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It exists, but the vast majority of government services dont use it (i.e. taxes are just done through belastingdienst.nl).

	▲	closewith an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, which I think is also very common, but what Wikipedia was referring to is that there's no official second-level domain for Government, unlike say gov.br or gov.uk). Gov.nl is just a domain owned by the Dutch Government, like gov.ie or belgium.be.

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fc417fc802 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ah. Just a blatant inaccuracy on wikipedia I take it. That does make a bit more sense.

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robin_reala 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yep. gov.nl is in the PSL[1] and there are plenty of used subdomains (e.g. https://business.gov.nl/)

[1] https://publicsuffix.org/list/public_suffix_list.dat

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djaro 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

As far as I can tell .gov.nl is only used for pages aimed at i.e. expats and businesses. Most services dutch people use simply have a .nl page like the digital id or filing taxes.

	▲	jurgenburgen 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		This makes sense because gov is anglocentric and would make the URLs sound weird in non-English countries.