SCN: Govt and the web

[Steve]

x-no-archive: yes  

====================  


(Rebecca Fairley Raney, Online Journalism Review)---The growth 
of the Internet and World Wide Web promised greater access to 
government at all levels. Journalists and the public could roam files 
at will - monitoring policy, tracking bills, checking voting records 
and even querying officials. Citizens could take out licenses and 
order birth certificates. E-government in the late '90s emerged with 
great expectations.  

Without question, government leaders have largely embraced the 
Internet. But they have encountered obstacles in recent years to 
building good government Web sites. Programmers, during the dot-
com boom, were too expensive to hire. High-profile hackings 
terrified the custodians of sensitive databases. Legislatures didn't 
want to pay for Web sites.  

Now, even though programmers are cheaper and security is better, 
in many cases, government policymakers still do not want to pay, 
or are no longer capable of paying to provide information and 
services online. A great source of information and data may soon 
become inaccessible, either by being too expensive for frequent 
use or walled off entirely.  

E-Government: The High Cost of Convenience  

On the California state Web site, the curious and the civic-minded 
only need to send an e-mail message to receive free electronic 
updates on the progress of any bill in the Legislature. But to 
receive the same service in Indiana, residents need a subscription 
that costs $49.50 per month.  

On Minnesota's state Web site, residents can read, at no charge, 
all opinions issued by the attorney general since 1993. But those 
who want to read opinions from the Kansas attorney general online 
must pay an initial subscription fee of $75, which can be renewed 
for $60 per year.  

Without question, the notion of price tags on links to public 
information was not part of the vision for the early proponents of e-
government. But because of the bad economy, such practices 
could become more common.  

At a moment when state, federal and local government agencies 
stand to offer better information online than ever, the prospect of 
budget deficits could compel more agencies to put public 
information on the Web for fees or not at all.  

Experts said those practices could defeat the vision for e-
government, which was to produce better self-government by 
creating easy access to government information.  

Darrell West, director of the Taubman Center for Public Policy at 
Brown University, which conducts annual studies of government 
Web sites, said the practice is "risky from the user standpoint."  

"There's always the risk that if citizens think they're going to pay 
more online than at the office, they're going to be reluctant to use 
the service," he said.  

Even so, the National Information Consortium, a company that 
specializes in subsidizing government portals through fees, is 
receiving a record number of inquiries about its model. Chris Neff, 
senior marketing director for NIC, said that if the practice were too 
controversial, the company's business model would not have 
survived for 10 years.  

In some respects, government agencies are in a better position 
now to create dynamic Web sites than ever. For the first time in 
years, the salaries of Web designers and programmers have fallen 
to a level that government agencies can afford. Also, as more 
Americans have incorporated online searching and shopping into 
their routines, they have begun to request that services such as 
paying taxes and renewing driver's licenses be made available 
online.  

Brown University's most recent study of state and federal Web 
sites, which was released in September, showed tremendous 
improvement in the amount of information presented on sites in just 
a year. In an analysis of 1,680 Web sites in summer of 2001, 
researchers found that 93 percent offered access to publications, 
which was up from 54 percent of the sites they analyzed the 
summer before.  

Eighty-four percent of the sites offered a way for individuals to 
contact officials by e-mail, which was a strong increase from 68 
percent of sites that offered e-mail links in 2000. Ten percent of 
the sites accepted credit cards for transactions, up from 3 percent 
in 2000.  

But the prospect of government budget deficits could do more than 
stall the improvement of public information online.  

"This is coming at a very bad time for e-government, because e-
government was on the brink of expanding. It's going to lead to bad 
choices," West said, choices that could include placing advertising 
on government sites and adding fees for information.  

In his study, West found that the states of Kansas and Indiana had 
the highest percentage of Web sites - 12 percent each - to charge 
fees. Both states contract with NIC.  

In fact, of the 10 states in the study that have the highest 
percentages of Web sites to charge fees, seven of them contract 
with NIC for Web services. Those states, in addition to Kansas and 
Indiana, are Maine, Nebraska, Georgia, Montana and Idaho.  

NIC, based in Overland Park, Kansas, offers to build Web portals 
for states at no cost to taxpayers. The company makes money, in 
many cases, by sharing the fees charged for information on the 
sites.  

As the economy has stalled, the demand for NIC's fee-based 
portals has increased.  

"We developed a business model 10 years ago that's right for the 
times now," said Neff, senior marketing director for the company. 
"Our business development group has never been more busy" with 
inquiries about the fee-based model, Neff said.  

He said he does not believe fees deter individuals from using 
government services. In fact, he compared the practice to 
newspapers charging fees for extracting articles from archives 
online. Because the articles would be free to look up in the library, 
the users, by extracting them online, are deciding to pay for 
convenience.  

"Charging a transaction fee for an online service is not like a 
generic tax," Neff said. "There is still an offline version if people 
don't want to pay the fee."  

However, in many cases, he said, after state officials start offering 
services online like tax payments and driver's license renewals, 
they find that visits to their offices decrease and they save money. 
In those cases, he said, the states stop charging fees online.  

On Virginia's state Web site, for example, the fees are equal in cost 
or cheaper than they would be for people who seek the services at 
state offices, Neff said, because state officials factor their savings 
into the budget for the Web site.  

The Minnesota Legislature recently voted to allow the state's 
Department of Public Safety to charge fees for extracting criminal 
conviction records online. Officials persuaded legislators that they 
could not afford to provide the service otherwise.  

"My approach to that is, that's not a great idea," said state Senator 
Steve Kelley, the majority whip. "Hopefully we'll be able to make 
that free later on."  

His concern, he said, was that residents of the Twin Cities have 
access to systems that allow them to look up the records for free, 
so the fees could fall disproportionately onto the state's rural 
residents.  

"For the most part," Kelley said, "we tend to take the view that 
information should be free."  

Steven Clift, editor of the nonprofit Democracies Online newsletter, 
said fee-based services were "significantly anti-democratic."  

"If a transaction already costs money, and you can save money by 
putting it online, don't charge extra money," said Clift, who was 
project coordinator Minnesota's North Star government portal until 
1997. "If it costs more to provide it online, then you're doing it 
wrong."  

Clift, who also served as a senior planner on Minnesota's 
Government Information Access Council, said that in the mid-
1990s, "the Legislature basically junked the Kansas model," which 
involved charging fees.  

Of course, officials in many states do not share the view that Web 
services should reflect savings from fewer over-the-counter 
transactions. Clift is troubled by the trend.  

"If a government cannot serve its people, what legitimacy does it 
have?" he said. "If the legislature decides it's not a priority to do 
this, then just shut it down."  

FirstGov: A Gift Horse for the Federal Government  

In March of 2000, Eric Brewer, a computer scientist who was 
grateful for a federal grant he had received early in his career, 
decided to give the government a gift: a search engine that would 
comb millions of government Web sites.  

The Clinton Administration accepted his offer. Within three months, 
former President Clinton announced that the federal government 
would have its own portal running in 90 days - a feat that the 
government itself had failed to accomplish in three years of trying.  

Brewer made good on his offer, and within 90 days, the FirstGov 
portal was up and running. Now, the portal comprises 49 million 
government Web pages. It served 1.3 million individual visitors 
during the month of September. Though the search engine cost 
the government nothing, the portal runs at a cost of $2 million per 
year, according to the General Services Administration, which runs 
the site.  

The search engine works well. For example, on a search for a 
recent press release on Govnet, using only the word "Govnet," the 
Google search engine produced the document three pages into a 
list of dozens of search results. FirstGov, by comparison, kicked 
out the press release on the first link.  

FirstGov's creators built it to serve as a model for e-government. 
But inevitably, critics of the Clinton Administration's deal appeared 
at the first Congressional hearing on FirstGov just a few days after 
it launched. Their questions have continued.  

The chief problem: Brewer created the search engine through a 
nonprofit organization called the Federal Search Foundation, 
which is backed by Inktomi and Sun Microsystems. For technical 
work on the search engine, the foundation contracted with Inktomi -
a company that was founded by Brewer. Also, a lobbying group, 
the Software & Information Industry Association, whose 1,000 
members include Lexis-Nexis and AOL Time Warner, objected to 
the exclusive contract for the foundation and the restrictions 
imposed upon companies that want to link to the search engine: 
They cannot display advertising, and they cannot track the 
movements of individual visitors.  

Though the contract with the Federal Search Foundation is 
scheduled to expire in 2003, critics question whether Inktomi, 
which built the search engine with its proprietary software, stands 
to gain an unfair advantage when the contract goes out to bid.  

"It's a gift horse that government should have looked more closely 
in the mouth," said Patrice McDermott, an information policy 
analyst for the nonprofit group OMB Watch.  

David Binetti, president and chief executive of the Federal Search 
Foundation, said that within the terms of the deal, Inktomi would be 
on an equal footing with any company that wanted to bid for the 
contract.  

In August 2003, at the end of the current contract, the foundation 
will donate to the government the hardware that runs the search 
engine as well as an instruction manual on how to create the 
search engine.  

"That instruction manual can be given to anybody," Binetti said. 
"Any software provider should be able to get up and running in two 
weeks or sooner."  

The Software & Information Industry Association objected to the 
restrictions imposed upon companies that want to provide access 
to the search engine, which includes the bans on advertising and 
tracking individuals' activities.  

Internet companies "don't want to be limited on how they can 
provide it," said David LeDuc, director of public policy for the 
association.  

Though the association has argued that such measures run 
counter to freedom of access to government information, Deborah 
Diaz, deputy associate administrator for FirstGov at the GSA, said 
that setting standards was important so that users would be 
assured of their privacy when they search for government 
information.  

Diaz said the outlook for future funding of the portal is good, and 
that "the role of FirstGov has only been strengthened through the 
policy of the Administration."  

In fact, officials are planning to offer more ways for citizens to 
conduct business with government through the portal. Right now, 
they can buy stamps, shop at the Smithsonian and register for 
Selective Service. Diaz said officials are planning to create a 
system in which individuals could create a file with information 
about themselves and use it every time they return to the site to 
conduct transactions with government agencies.  

She said the agency has not determined whether government 
agencies or a private company would store the information about 
individuals.  

Of course, that step could attract even more scrutiny from groups 
who worry about the potential for government agencies to abuse 
information they collect from individuals.  

McDermott of OMB Watch said that the collection of personal 
information should be left to individual government agencies if the 
agencies are technically prepared to handle the task.  

"The proper approach for FirstGov to take is not to even collect 
that information on their site," she said. "They open themselves up 
to all sorts of complications. They'll draw all sorts of attention from 
privacy organizations."  

Govnet: Recreating the Internet?  

A few weeks ago, the U.S. General Services Administration sent 
out a request for companies to report how they would build a 
private network, separate from the Internet, where federal 
agencies could do their work.  

The proposed network, called Govnet, "must be able to perform its 
functions with no risk of penetration or disruption from users on 
other networks, including the Internet," according to the press 
release on the proposal.  

Of course, no sooner had the request gone public than the 
contentious community of network security experts started poking 
holes in it. Specialists in that field tend to operate from the 
assumption that every system can be broken, and many experts 
submit that calling a system impenetrable promotes a false sense 
of security.  

"The idea that you can build an enclave that is secure and totally 
isolated from the Internet is ludicrous," said Peter Neumann, 
principal scientist for SRI International's Computer Science Lab, 
author of "Computer-Related Risks" and a regular adviser to 
Congressional committees. "The idea of building something that is 
large and secure is oxymoronic."  

Elias Levy, chief technical officer for SecurityFocus, a company 
that provides intelligence on network security to corporations, said 
that any system running through the same fiber optic cables as the 
Internet would crash if the Internet crashed. But to run a system 
through a separate infrastructure would be exorbitantly expensive, 
he said. "You're re-creating the Internet," he said.  

Aside from technical issues, building a closed system has the 
potential to discourage agencies from putting information on public 
systems, Levy said.  

"This may result in pulling information that should be publicly 
available," he said. "Some agencies may feel they don't have 
resources to run two systems, so they pull Internet information."  

A federal official familiar with the Govnet project said that creating 
the most secure network possible is a worthwhile project.  

"Our point of view is, you simply have to address known 
vulnerabilities," said the official, who declined to be identified.  

Federal officials will review proposals from telecommunications 
companies and decide whether to pursue the project next year.  


Copyright 2001 Online Journalism Review   





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