89,004 local governments existed in the United States in 2012. By extension, there are a shit-ton of public sector websites including schools and libraries. So why can’t there be a public-funded search engine just for indexing all the public service websites?
Citizens who need to access a public service should not have to visit some shitty Google-like search engine by a surveillance advertiser to find a public resource. Google and Microsoft should not be gateways to public access. They can offer their shitty service for private sector searches but governments should have sovereignty from that. If I have to ask tech giants what is the URL for my secretary of state, it’s a fucked up dependency.
It also shouldn’t just be a search engine. There should also be a hierarchical structured directory. A public service directory plus search engine would be inherently ad-free and tracker free, federally funded.
Progress needed.
That is academically interesting about DDG !gov. Though I avoid DDG.
I would like to hear the excuse of the world’s wealthiest country that outspends the world cumulatively on defense by a factor of 10 say “we can’t afford to deploy a search engine” even though some dude built stract.com by himself in his off hours.
That’s probably closer to the issue.
Though w.r.t. age, I think the young crowd works against us. In principle the 1980s generation experienced a free and open non-commercialized internet. The millennials and younger started out as corporate pawns and don’t know what a pre-technofeudal internet looks like. But the problem is the leaders are all too low-tech to have experienced the 1990s internet anyway.
/me has a flashback to Neil deGrass Tyson naming off the professional expertise of Congress people and said something like: “business… business… business… law… law… business… where is the rest of life?”
Please don’t put engineers in Congress.we don’t understand how people work
That’s a hell of a lot better than business people, who use their knowledge of people to exploit them. One great example of this is campaigning to become POTUS right now.
We need leaders who understand technology and who are keen to have technology benefit people rather than exploit them. IOW, a Congress with engineers from the FOSS community would greatly benefit the country (obviously not an engineer who understands people well which they use against people; e.g. people like Zuckerberg, Bill Gates or Matthew Prince).
I don’t disagree, but I think it’s important to understand where we will fail. Firstly, it’s not going to be the Aaron Schwartz types, it’s going to be the zuck types. But also I do think we would benefit from civil and electrical engineers legislating on infrastructure. But they’d also legislate on medicine and think that as an engineer they’re smart, they understand science, and why can’t we move an ecoptic pregnancy to the uterus. Or just not understanding how to incentivize people to do things. Many engineers exist with massive blinders, partly of our own making, and partly because it’s really easy for an engineer to just accidentally not know any poor people, people of color, or other members of disadvantaged groups. I’d love to have some of us there if we could get engineers who have a level of genuine humility and love of humanity that I can’t imagine seeing in congress. Like I want someone like me in congress, but holy fuck that sounds like a terrible job dealing with the worst people and more stress than I could deal with alongside me being fully and completely unelectable.
But also yeah business people need the fuck out of government. And I would love groups like a FOSS group there. I’d love for the government to actively claim patents for its research and use them to further fund research or to just provide them in the public domain. Hell I’d love something similar for art too. But I don’t think engineers are needed for that per se, and I don’t think picking engineers specifically will ever get you that.