In software this is called “adding a layer of indirection”. For example, if the government wanted to hide the fact that they use MS for email, they can simply use email aliases. If you send an email to someservice@website.gov, you will have no idea what provider they are using (assuming that they take measures to hide it).

An alias would not shield them from an MX lookup (which is exactly what I do before sharing an email address).

Nonetheless, that’s just a technical nuance… your underlying point is still valid. A better example for expressing your point is the use of e-mail firewalls. I once did an MX lookup on an agency which resulted in something like “barracudanetworks.xyz”. I erroneously concluded: that’s not a surveillance advertiser so I will share my email with them. Then they later emailed me from a Microsoft server.

Email firewalls like barracuda effectively hide the role of MS, thus making MX lookups inconclusive. That opacity gives me a tangible thread of ammunition in court when the shit hits the fan because I would have no way of knowing that barracuda feeds Microsoft for that particular recipient. But then how does this play into your thesis? The gov has a choice of whether or not to use an email firewall like that. To support your position of forced-digital-transformation, you would have to mandate that a firewall like barracuda be used by all gov agencies. Of course from there who’s to say everyone trusts barracuda networks?

I was talking about minimizing third-party dependencies, not minimizing data abuse.

To be clear, I was talking about /minimization of data/, not abuse, but for the ultimate effect of mitigating data abuses. So that’s what I thought you were suggesting. As for minimizing third-party dependencies, I would certainly praise such a movement. But it’s unrealistic. There are far too many right-wing conservatives. Increasingly so. The hard-right crowd pushes for the extreme opposite. They love capitalism and want all gov services to be privitized to the full extent possible. They want everything outsourced and they are succeeding in that mission. Countless cases where privatization is abusive, inappropriate, and ineffective proliferates in the US.

So I suppose your question is: what if we could hypothetically pass a law the forces the gov to insource everything. It’s borderline crazy talk. Does that mean there should be government farms to provide food for those incarcerated in prison? It’s very unrealistic that you could ever have a minimization of outsourcing. So then the devil is in the details of where exceptions are made. Even in the digital space, surely some gov agencies would make a case for why they need MS OS on their platform because they have some specific special needs. It would be a game of exceptions… a mess by which abusive admins would make uncredible cases for why they should have MS Windows and whatever other garbage. It’s an impossible line to maintain.

So in this hypothetical world where outsourcing is banned, that would eliminate some of my problems with forced-digital-transformation. But it doesn’t wholly address the privacy issue (e.g. an insourced resource could still needlessly collect IP addresses). I doubt any of these problems would be sufficiently addressed in my lifetime to justify forced-digital engagement.

Those same creators would work just as hard to work around laws that require offline access.

Sure, but to be clear I don’t think I ever said game makers should be mandated by law to support offline gamers. I winged about a problem without prescribing a solution. The solution could be a consumer boycott. Or it could be gov action. I think a somewhat effective gov action might be to simply state that copyrights are forfeited by artificial game requirements. Game makers would then have to choose between legal protections and purely tech protections. Whatever attempt they make to “work around” the law could also be regarded as an “artificially-imposed constraint”.

There is no perfect solution. Certainly across the board abandonment of copyright would not solve this problem. Which is not to say it’s a bad idea.

I’ll just say that trying to force game companies to provide offline playability, is fairly unrealistic.

I agree. But it’s important to recognize that “force” comes in many forms. There is gov force; then there is market force (by which consumers boycott, for example). I will of course use what little force I have at my disposal, which is to never buy a game with absurd artificial constraints.