Makes sense to me. Why give their code and feedback to competitors? You want to keep your internal stuff internal.

Honestly the level of local tax dodging strategies in use are off the charts and only worsening Australia's net trade deficit. Apple: earned billions in Australia in 2023/24 and paid zero income tax here, per the latest ATO transparency data and analysis of the report. Microsoft: same story as Apple in 2023/24, billions in Australian income and zero income tax. Netflix: about A$1.2b in Australian revenue in 2023/24 and paid zero company tax. The âoebig fiveâ US tech firms (Microsoft, Google, Facebook/Meta, Apple, Amazon) together paid only about A$650m of tax on their Australian operations in 2022/23, despite multi-billion local revenues. Having local media quotas is the bare minimum. Updating the tax rules to exclude strategies like exorbitant charging for IP for trademark and marketing materials from company owned subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions. It certainly doesn't go far enough.

Nice write up, sums up a lot of the issues with a major rewrite of a decades old system.

You have to remember this wasn't just a website, it was several decades of technical debt sitting on end of life onprem databases, middleware and legacy code that needed rewriting. This is also a migration to cloud enabled modern stack with a heap of backend and front end Integrations. Did Accenture charge a bomb for the BOM website?! Yes they did. Australia has a problem where government departments outsource all the decisions to consultancies and doesn't do much in-house any more in the name of "small government". In the process the tax payer pays through the nose.

Only once they realize it.

At least some of us get it.

This sounds like a case perfect for the Institute for Justice. https://ij.org/ Check with them because they love this kind of stuff.

The fact that more people are not worried about Flock and Ring is truly disturbing on a whole new level.

Came here to say the same. Common misconception, many people don't know this important detail.

My Samsung remote has had the solar panel in the back for some green washing too. So glad I can save 100mah of power every 3 months!

Sheesh, if you need proof, it's the people willing to pay this much for a bag.

Sounds like they are deflecting from the backlash.

Proof we are now living in the era of the Idiocracy

For now. Goggle is trying to lock down the sideloading and the play store.

They only use water because it is cheap. They can cool with no water use if needed. So a data center water tariff would change things dramatically.