Microsoft Lock-In On The Hill

Here’s a thing you probably wouldn’t know unless you’re unfortunate enough to be in the tiny DC political web development business: hosting for Congressional web sites is strictly on the Microsoft server platform. Strictly. As in, even if a Congressperson wanted their site powered by LAMP, they couldn’t have it. Instead, it’s all ASP and MSSQL. No choice.

That’s not a good thing for any number of political (in the non-professional sense) reasons, but mostly for fiscal ones. It means shops like ours can’t deliver the best possible service and end-product at the lowest cost. I would argue that it also limits constituents’ electronic access to their representatives by making it more costly and difficult to develop innovative web applications for connecting voters. And while some ASP developers would disagree, I imagine, I strongly believe that open source is the strongest foundation for technology projects in the public interest. Open ASP projects “count,” of course, but the ideal platform is one open from system to application layer.

I’d like to see Congresspersons get their choice of hosting platforms. It won’t happen.