* AWS
* Comcast for their internet service
* Apple for their laptop
* A number of software providers for their development tools.
But asking the customer to pay google to query the data is crossing the line?
Site hosting is not a customer cost.
The rest you list are costs orthogonal to this service.
> But asking the customer to pay google to query the data is crossing the line?
Yes.
Why are you arguing for a US government agency to require its citizens to pay for access to data which they have already paid for by funding said agency?
That was what was suggested upthread.
Requiring the user to have certain capacities to access data, where those capacities are provided by a number of competing vendors (and some by free, gratis and/or libre sources) is a very different thing.
So are you ok with some chinese APP company making 50 crappy NPS themed apps and having taxpayers pay for the backend?
I will make that trade every day of the week if it means access continues to be through a standard protocol (HTTP) and not beholden to any particular vendor.
Addressed in a comment in another subthread, which I know you are aware of since you responded to it, too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39086270
What?
Taxes are, generally, money.
That's the difference.
That's fundamentally a lot worse than the government paying hosting costs to one particular vendor for a commodity service.
People have quite literally died over the issue of public access to public data. It’s quite an important belay point to arrest the deterioration of the spirit of open networks.