It's actually quite simple. The government can buy things services from specific providers, but it cannot force you to buy services from specific providers. In other words, it can buy BMWs for government use, but it cannot say "you have to buy a BMW to enter the municipal office".

The same applies to websites. If a government website uses Google analytics, it is essentially requiring you to do business with a specific company (in this case Google) in order to use a government service.

And if the government uses Cloudflare or GoDaddy or aws it’s requiring you to do business with those companies. This goal is impossible to achieve with any government run service.

It's easy. You just need the government to run fiber to every citizens house so that the can connect directly to the government data center.

Of course some citizens are living over seas so we can provide a satellite uplink for them.

No, those do not see any benefit from me visiting the site beyond what the government is paying them for. Analytics does, they get my data.

> cannot force you to buy services from specific providers

But government can impose requirements, like TAA compliance (1) and SHB requirements (2) on its service vendors, forcing those vendors to purchase from a fairly constrained number of hardware providers.

https://www.dtra.mil/Portals/61/Documents/Business%20Docs/ev...

https://www.afcea.org/site/sites/default/files/files/2-ColLi...

If the government takes your data and runs an analysis on an old IBM mainframe, are they forcing you to do business with IBM?

Is this a bad faith argument? I can't see how the difference of google having the data vs the government (or whatever entity you interacted directly with) is so easy to miss.

Could you expand on the definition of "doing business with" an entity that you're using here? It seems quite non-standard.

If you open the door to a govt office, are you doing business with the company who installed the doors? If you use the toilet, are you doing business with the company that janitorial services are contracted out to?

No, when you leave that govt office you don't have any link to those companies.

When you visit a site with Google Analytics, they still have your data after you leave.

I see, I think framing it as "doing business" threw me off. Semantics aside, this distinction is meaningful.

This analogy does not apply.

The gov. is using some service and therefore some citizen data is subject to the T&C's and that's it.

If Google were a German or UK company it would be the same thing - everyone subject to those T&C's.

The gov is forcing me to pay the crony corporations through taxing me

Can the government own a BMW bus?

The issue (per original article) is one of data sovereignty, and I’d identify a sibling concern of adopting open data formats.

If those are sacrosanct, the choice of tools vendor matters far less.

where to draw the line is a fair question in any policy debate, and one i'd expect to draw plenty of lively discussion. it's pretty clear to me that surveillance tech is on the outside of that line, but i'm open to reasonable arguments otherwise.