At a time when both government agencies and the public are ready for better Internet services, several high-profile examples of e-government are dogged by pressing issues: States face a lingering debate over whether the public should pay fees for information online. Please see below: 'E-Government: The High Cost of Convenience'.
A search engine for government Web sites remains a popular target for groups that question its origin as a gift from a civic-minded technocrat to the Clinton Administration. Please see below: 'FirstGov: A Gift Horse for the Federal Government'.
Security experts question a proposal for a closed network where civilian federal agencies can tuck away all their daily work. Please see below: 'Govnet: Recreating the Internet?'
Each of these trends represents a challenge to journalists. A great source of information and data may soon become inaccessible, either by being too expensive for frequent use or walled off entirely. And the timing could not be worse. As one source below notes, 'e-government was on the brink of expanding.'
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.
'We would be out of business if it were otherwise,' he said.
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, Kan., 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.
Quelle: Online Journalism Review
