DigiD is a government project. It's owned and operated by Logius, which is a government-owned entity.

Logius outsourced the hosting and infrastructure to Solvinity.

I'm mostly bewildered that the Dutch government was ok with that, and it took way too much effort from the opposition to get them to pivot on this.

> I'm even more bewildered that an American company thought that they could take over the national identity management system of an European country, as if this was business as usual.

I assume the Dutch government is able to define the procurement process in any way they see fit, I’d point my finger at them instead of Solvinity. If they wanted EU only bidders, then they should’ve disqualified non-EU bidders in the RFP.

Governments are not the only players needing working digital id, and sometimes banks are faster to build it.

The entire customs system of all of China used to be run by European foreigners. Not because of Western imperialism, but on invitation from the Chinese rulers, as a measure to combat corruption.

Some European countries right now have their currency printing and their passport printing outsourced to foreign nations.

These things aren't too unusual.

As a Dutch person, I'm not. Dutch administrators are traditionally wary of doing anything themselves that they could conceivably outsource to a commercial party. That also results in endless swarms of locus^H^H^H^H^Hconsultants feeding on our taxes.

I hate it, but what can you do, this is sadly what people here keep voting for.

When EU ID is needed for Eurovision voting we can all act surprised by the change in rankings.

Yes.. their days of not taking the threat seriously certainly have come to a middle.

Then they'll be in breach of contract. Lots of government contracts have a "no outsourcing" clause.

For some reason the government isn't willing to pay software developer salaries. It would rather pay a company to pay them instead.

> What's wrong with the government taking over admin of DigiD?

Because they're a government and they are therefore going to fuck it up.

Any network service with 24x7 availability and millions of users requires constant maintenance. Hardware has some lifetime and needs to be maintained and replaced. OS needs patching. Dependencies need security updates and, time to time, migrations to next major LTS update. Sometimes new requirements come from regulatory, that need development of new features. The skill set needs to be maintained. Support requests need to be served. Law enforcement may ask for some data.

Add to this hard digital sovereignty requirements: continuity of service must be guaranteed for decades. All this requires quite a special setup in which commercial entities are rather tolerated than welcomed, but they may still make more sense than a government agency so constrained by budget process that they cannot hire any decent engineer.