Venyu Blog

In his 1729 satirical essay entitled “A Modest Proposal: For Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick,” Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift makes the suggestion that Irish nationals might be better off economically by selling their children as food to affluent gentlemen and ladies. In its time, the essay was widely believed to mock the authority of his fellow British countrymen. 

One wonders how Swift might view British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s own recent “modest” proposal that would push ALL government services online within four years.

According to a story in TimesOnline.com all British citizens would have their own web page to access government services, resulting in the slashing of billions in cost for providing those same services on a face-to-face basis.

Remarkably, the inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim-Berners-Lee (sorry Mr. Gore), is already on board with this idea and advising PM Brown on the project.  Sir Tim reasons there are cost savings realized from migrating government services to the World Wide Web; for example, he cites the processing of a piece of paper and mailing it back costs many more times than it costs to process something electronically.

Reinforcing those savings is a report produced by PriceWaterhouse Coopers that estimates the Government could save as much as £900 million a year simply by bringing those who don’t have access to the internet online – the total savings would be far bigger if those with computers could access all services online.

As you can imagine in spite of the perceived savings, a cacophony of dissenting voices has been raised throughout the UK largely dismissing this paradigm shift in citizen-government relations as another excuse not to make government easier to deal with, but rather to cut back services. Never mind the very real concerns over citizen privacy or the emergence of a new strata of bureaucrat focused entirely on helping seniors navigate Sir Tim’s vast cyber search highway in order to access the offramp to their personal home page.

If this is the eventuality of how data is treated in the future, not only in government, but also by business, perhaps all data compiled every day by every municipality and business in every corner of the globe, should be redirected, in totality, to the “Cloud.”  It’s certainly as palatable a solution as moving all government services online and far less offensive, of course, than serving up the current crop of the UK’s best and brightest IT administrators as appetizers at the next sitting of the British House of Commons.