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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Federal agencies routinely charge other federal agencies for services. Just because it's "all taxpayer money" doesn't mean that each agency doesn't have to fit within their own budget.
> I'd like to see how much of the NTIS revenue actually came from the real market.
The problem is that federal revenue doesn't come from the real market. Unlike (most) private businesses, they don't have to earn their customers and retain them through good service. There are usually no competitors and sometimes, through law, no alternatives.
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.
> My issue with this bill is that it ignores the crucial function of NTIS as a library.
Insofar as that is a critical function, the bill allows the Secretary of Commerce to declare it as such and, provided the Comptroller-General finds that the function isn't duplicated elsewhere in the federal government, transfer the function to another office within the Department of Commerce. See Section 3(b) of the bill.
To be fair the Internet that we know today only really became a consumer service in the 90's. Whilst its origins are before then, it was used by groups which we would class as researchers and early adopters.
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.
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.
When you search through Google Scholar, the quality of the information you get is actually really good. IMHO the best solution is to get rid of NTIS' goal to be profitable, and simply make it an agency that collects and distributes those documents for free. Integration with Google Scholar would be a logical next step.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
