Y2K Redux and the Case Against Tech Monopolies in Government

This month’s global IT disruption is Y2K twenty-four years late.

Does anyone else remember New Year’s Eve 1999? I don’t because I was a small child, but my father, who at the time was the systems editor for a west coast newspaper, remembers being at the office that night after accepting a retainer bonus and testing the main newspaper system for weeks, only to have to have nothing happen. No global computer crash, no grounded flights, no Armageddon.


So, imagine my surprise upon arriving to my desk job at state government one warm July morning to find that about half of my floor had zero computer access. Thus unencumbered by the responsibilities of the workday, I sat around for eight hours and chitchatted with similarly effected colleagues.


From my phone screen, I could see that this was not just our workplace, but flights, 911 operators, healthcare facilities. This is the Y2K fallout late-’90s doomsday preppers thought was coming, only about 24 years too late. However, this year’s Y2K is not due to an issue with standard date formats, but instead corporate greed and the divestiture of government institutions.

Reliance  

In the Digital Age, most government functions are online or on the computer. From the email service to the way we store data about recipients of WIC or SNAPP benefits, computers are necessary for the daily functioning of government. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing until you think more about who is supplying the email service. 

Microsoft has a history of regulatory violations and security weaknesses: 

• Violating US export sanctions by selling software and other services to sanctioned nations (Syria, Cuba, Russia, etc.).
• Facing anti-trust suits both domestically and internationally for price-fixing and other anti-competitive practices. 
• Having a Microsoft-owned subsidiary in Hungary bribe foreign government officials in order to obtain more business for Microsoft. 
• Not fixing known weaknesses, which allowed Chinese hackers to gain access to government officials’ email accounts. 

Yet, this is the software I, and millions of other government employees, use every day. 

Other companies, like Amazon, are also sucking dry government institutions. 

At public health conferences, particularly the ones that target public health workers in technical fields like epidemiology and data science, it’s pretty shocking the AWS (Amazon Web Services) saturation. Most conferences have vendors (software companies, consulting firms) “tabling” – which is where they set up tables with their promotional material and some branded swag to schmooze conference attendees to find new customers, and/or new employees. AWS requires companies who utilize their services to have a small white placard at their booths indicating that they are “AWS sponsored”. Every table manned by sales reps in impeccable business casual, had an AWS placard. Many of those vendors offer services to federal, state, and local governments. 

However, as discussed by Cory Doctrow in a recent article, Amazon’s monopoly is not through AWS but through its online retail operations. If anything, AWS is a profitable venture and a sort of shell company to disguise the hold that Amazon holds over the online retail landscape. 

Some of the issues are that the law and the courts are famously behind the times when it comes to technology (just listen to the questions social media executives get asked at congressional hearings), our regulatory entities like the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are legislatively weakened by the GOP, and the punishment for these multi-billion-dollar companies are often fines that are minuscule in the face of the profits they gain by breaking the law.  

Tech monopolies in government are also driven by the divestiture of the American state. 

One of the features of the GOP’s belief system is “big government bad”. The party routinely works to reduce the size of government, primarily by reducing budgets. “Cutting government spending” never refers to lawmaker’s salaries though ($174k to work half of the year, if you’re wondering) – just reducing the amount of money being spent on things like disability services, Meals on Wheels, and public education. 

This means that government must outsource essential services to private industry. 

This manifests as a proliferation of contractors (Edward Snowden’s memoir Permanent Record has excellent criticism of this) and a reliance on software made by private enterprise. 

With proper funding and personnel, the state could create and maintain the software it needs. However with budgets being what they are, government is unable to recruit and retain the talent that gets snapped up by private tech companies. The reliance on privately made software only leads to further strain on budgets as the state now has to pay whatever the software companies decide to charge. 

This is an artifact of the new “techno-feudalist” era we find ourselves in. Like a medieval feudal lord, the software companies from Spotify to Microsoft, rent goods and services to the consumer, rather than the consumer owning the software or music outright. And again, like a feudal lord, the companies can choose to kick us off their land or charge higher rent if they so decide. 

An example of this happening in the public health world is that my current agency was informed that the company that provides the data analysis software upon which our entire public health infrastructure is built is moving to a cloud-based system. They’re pivoting to the new (and more profitable) “software as a service” model to keep the state a renter and never an owner. This issue is, it would cost over a million dollars to continue using those services, and there just isn’t the money for it.  

There is now low-level existential dread among many of us, wondering if we’re going to have to be cross trained on another type of software, and if we’re going to have to spend months (or even years) translating over a decade of code from one software language to another. This could hinder our effects to reduce the number of fatal overdoses, ensure that mothers are getting prenatal care, ensure that doctors aren’t over prescribing opioid pain medications. 

So now what? 

Near global reliance on software from a single company is problematic. It’s a problem that could be solved for governments, but it’s not a priority and government likely doesn’t have the money it would take – partly because one half of our political system wants as little government as possible. 

Mainly, government needs to increase personnel funding in order to hire and pay people to produce and maintain necessary software. Government institutions related to the military do this, however they have trillion-dollar budgets. 

Folks currently working in IT and non-defense related scientific fields are paid less than their private industry colleagues, especially for those with more education. It also seems, anecdotally at least, that the best and brightest in local government leave for greener pastures as soon as they get the chance. The golden handcuffs of job security, a retirement pension, and good work-life balance lose their shine when compared to six figure private sector salaries.  

Overall, we need to start advocating for putting money and personnel back into government. As we hollow out the state more and more, a cyclical issue emerges where there’s not enough people to do the work, so the agencies look like they’re failing to meet their goals and objectives, so money gets cut further. 

If we want a functioning government, one where the Department of Motor Vehicles has enough staff to get your license renewed, where the Postal Service delivers your grandmother’s Christmas card, where air traffic control gets your flight safely in the air, we need to make sure there’s enough money and workers for that to happen.