this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
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One more example of a private service being used as if it were a utility.
This one is especially egregious considering it's an Amber Alert, but it isn't necessarily unique. Despite the internet being designed as open, it has been taken over by private entities, and any popular service is ultimately controlled by such entities.
It's a hard problem to solve. Look at federated platforms like Lemmy: they take a long time to populate, and their usefulness is partly a function of how successful that population is. By definition, a free, open platform will not have the advertising, reach, or "it factor" of a corporate service. When given the choice between an open platform and a corporate one, we see people choose the corporate one time and time again.
We have taken our open network and handed it, willingly, to private enterprise.
I think a good first step would be to require all public services and similar to transition to FOSS software only. Schools, governments, public health, etc, should not, generally speaking, be in the business of making money for private interests, nor should our data be stored in these black boxes. If we don't own it; it owns us. Sure that's a huge departure from current reality, but I see it as fairly clear cut. I'm sure people will say I go too far.
The federal government does or at least did have a decent in-house open source dev team (legally, work done by the us government has a copyright which belongs to the people, making it roughly open source). The us government is also filled with people who believe that any failure to extract profit is a failure at life, so the government also outsources a bunch of work to priv companies which do retain their copyrights, but it's not required.
Check out this guy and his research if you haven't already. Confirms what you describe, with some rally alarming numbers and data to back it up