

Let Me Google That For You Act - cwisecarver
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:S.2206.IS:/

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mmmmax
TL;DR: This bill attempts to disband The National Technical Information
Service (NTIS), which collects and sells information and research. The bill
asserts that the agency is no longer important, since you can basically just
Google it now.

~~~
vizeroth
The purpose in founding the NTIS was to ensure that information and research
was available to U.S. industry, government, academia, and the public. This is
especially the case for government-funded research, but also includes
technical information from foreign and other sources.

It's like saying you don't need the U.S. Copyright Office any more because the
record and movie labels do such a wonderful job making sure their content is
widely available.

"Of the reports added to NTIS's repository during fiscal years 1990 through
2011, GAO estimates that approximately 74 percent were readily available from
other public sources."

Yes, because proving that 26% of the material added is not readily available
elsewhere proves their uselessness... Oh, and let's not forget that the
mandate for them to be profitable did not exist until just before it started
to become impossible for them to do so.

~~~
snsr
> let's not forget that the mandate for them to be profitable did not exist
> until just before it started to become impossible for them to do so.

I'd be curious to read more about this. Looks like this isn't the first time
the agency has been in the cross-hairs (from 1999) -

[http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Commerce-
Departme...](http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Commerce-Department-
Plans-to-Shut-Down-NTIS-17918.asp)

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primitivesuave
_NTIS has compensated for its lost revenue by charging other Federal agencies
for various services that are not associated with NTIS 's primary mission._

So when a federal entity isn't providing enough revenue to the federal
government, it can compensate for it by charging other federal entities. This
seems like a very convenient way for government businesses to misreport their
actual income - I'd like to see how much of the NTIS revenue actually came
from the _real_ market.

~~~
azernik
This is frequently done in large corporations too - divisions which don't
directly serve customers, but instead provide enabling services to other
divisions, make "internal accounting" charges against the budgets of the
divisions they serve.

This is useful, in that it can let a support service (like, say, IT) prove its
use in the regular way that businesses do (profitability). It also keeps other
divisions from treating internal resources that are costly to maintain and
provide as "free" \- if they can find the same service outside of the
organization for cheaper (i.e. in this case through Google), they have an
incentive to use it.

The issue here seems to be that the NTIS is unprofitable, and it's not
actually essential to the functioning of any other parts of the federal
government.

tl;dr: Large organizations usually work in practice as a cluster of smaller
organizations participating in a free market.

~~~
mgkimsal
Ran in to this a couple of times over the last few years. The problem is that
the internal group doesn't usually really operate as if they are in the free
market, they just get to operate like a monopoly. I had to work with different
orgs who were mandated to use the internal IT dept for all projects, but the
IT dept had no incentive to actually do any work.

When you needed a server - that will take 3 weeks to set up. Really? It's
going to take you _3 weeks_ to provision a new VMWare instance (cause 90% of
the servers provided were VMWare instances). Really? OK. Hrm... There's a typo
in the hostname - can we get that fixed? "No, that will require too much work
updating our network to accommodate that."

Hrm... OK... Can we get an account for the outside contractor (me) to get on
the VPN? "That may be 2 weeks - the person that does that is leaving for
vacation on Thursday." Umm... It's Monday now. "There's a lot of stuff to get
done before they leave."

I _get_ that there's some benefits to having this centralized - security
updates, monitoring, etc - but the impact of waiting weeks for things that
should take a few minutes with any company in the real outside world is real
(although hard to measure). When the entirety of the org is constrained this
way, there's no comparisons to be made to make your case that it shouldn't
take this long; many projects should be measured in weeks, not fiscal years.

FWIW, the times I've run in to this in the past... 15 years or so, it's
usually academia. My understanding is that this is its own particular brand of
IT hell.

~~~
shortstuffsushi
The company I'm working for suffers from the same problem, but it's compounded
by the fact that our IT is now almost 100% offshore. This means on top of
having to wait for new VMs, we also have to fight a language barrier to
explain what we need and why.

As a developer who has to wait weeks for instances that I could spin up myself
in a day or less, and instead has to wait for literal weeks, I really don't
see how this cuts costs. Perhaps, as you mentioned, it makes monitoring the
systems easy, but for internal instances that have no internet access, how
valuable is this?

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waterlesscloud
Oh those wacky congressional staffers.

Also, they should Google the creation date of the internet. :-)

"(2) NTIS was established in 1950, more than 40 years before the creation of
the Internet."

~~~
rosser
_...more than 40 years before the creation of the_ [World Wide Web].

I think the internet, were it a person, would've been old enough to vote, if
not _drink_ in 1990.

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ErikTheViking
My issue with this bill is that it ignores the crucial function of NTIS as a
library. That is, an official source of these documents with a responsibility
to maintain, categorize, and retain them. Various other public sites have no
such responsibility.

~~~
craftsman
I agree, but why not use, say, a library? The Library of Congress comes to
mind. Perhaps the National Archives would be appropriate as well.

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spankalee
I wonder if this is such a good idea, since we all know that everything on the
internet is true.

It takes some real skill to find reliable, accurate, up-to-date information on
the internet. Could NTIS still serve a purpose by Googling for more critical
research? Or maybe the idea is that that job is for the Congressional Research
Service.

~~~
azernik
The bill specifically points out that Google generally points to the
originating agency of the reports in question. That is, the NSIT was
originally supposed to let the Department of Commerce find Department of
Agriculture datasets, but now the DoA just publishes those on its own website
and the DoC can just cut out the middleman.

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outside1234
the capital G on www.Google.com is a nice touch that makes you feel extra good
about the internet savvy-ness of our representatives.

~~~
dragonwriter
The capital G is not (even insofar as any text in a Bill is) originally
written by "our representatives", its in material directly quoted from a GAO
review.

Unless it inaccurately presents the content of that review, it doesn't say
anything about the author of the legislation, except that they quote properly.

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nashashmi
I am very concerned about what will become of the archives. A lot of articles
stored by NTIS are not easily available on the internet. Some of those
articles were produced by old disbanded research offices of the U.S.
Government (and they were really good articles). However, my mind cannot
recall what offices they were and what papers they had produced to be able to
give you a proper example.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Have they been scanning these old articles?

In the mid-90's I had to travel to NIST in Virginia to repair a "pick-to-
light" system for document retrieval that my company had built. All I remember
is a massive basement filled with rows of pigeonhole shelves with each hole
containing a document that could be removed and photocopied for the requesting
agency. Considering that the library must have been continuously growing since
then, getting all those documents online has to be a _huge_ task.

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binarymax
I have seen the writing on the wall for quite some time, as we use NCCI [1] as
well as other data provided by NTIS. Myself and many of my colleagues are
eagerly awaiting what will happen, as we make software that is directly
impacted by this, and need to know how to make sure we can have continuous
operation for our customers. It will be an interesting transition, but as this
data usually goes, probably a challenging one.

[1]
[http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/NCC_HOPPS_IOCE_Subscriber_Discontinu...](http://www.ntis.gov/pdf/NCC_HOPPS_IOCE_Subscriber_Discontinuance_Letter%2012.13.pdf)

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RyJones
It would be nice to pull the plug; color me skeptical it will ever happen,
though.

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talder
> Effective on the date that is 1 year after the date of the enactment of this
> Act

So government documents are the inspiration for the way the Krang talk in the
new TMNT cartoons...

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seigel
Are they advocating that we should not pay for movies and such as well? Read:

"No Federal agency should use taxpayer dollars to purchase a report from the
National Technical Information Service that is available through the Internet
for free."

It doesn't say 'legally' in there any where in there.

Anyhoo....

