2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

ddoener about 4 hours ago 21 commentsRead Article on mxmap.ch

HI version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

Related ongoing thread: Swiss authorities want to reduce dependency on Microsoft - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827383

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Discussion (21 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

zephyreon•about 3 hours ago

Posts like these always give me a moment of pause to reflect just how expansive the global internet is.

totetsu•about 2 hours ago

I wonder how that one county ended up on infomaniak https://www.infomaniak.com/

perotid•about 1 hour ago

Which county do you mean? Can you elaborate? Thanks.

veleek•34 minutes ago

I found at least three counties using that hosting provider by just clicking around randomly, so I’m not sure what the context is for that comment.

Petit-Val (BE) and Evolène (VS) are two.

doener•about 3 hours ago

Via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47827716

jeffbee•about 4 hours ago

TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices. Why isn't there a national-level host that frees municipalities from having to think about it?

rzwitserloot•about 2 hours ago

Switserland is a true confederation. It consists of 26 cantons and in most ways each canton is sovereign.

As an example, swiss cantons are considerably more independent from the Swiss Confederacy (i.e. what most people know and call 'Switserland' the entity) than the states of the USA are.

As an example of how far that goes: Switzerland essentially does not have a capital. The cantons usually do, though. Bern is the seat of the Federal Assembly and is usually considered the capital, more because social norms and systems are based on the notion that all countries must have one.

Swiss cantons can work together and often do, but evidently, not on this.

clbrmbr•about 4 hours ago

Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations. Local self-determination. Amazing place if you ask me would move back there in a heartbeat.

clbrmbr•about 4 hours ago

They also (at the cantonal level) have disparate education systems, with classes and grade levels mismatching between neighboring cantons. Yet, if you check what typical Swiss high school students are actually leaning (say at College de Candolle in Geneva), they are learning 3–5 languages, real literary analysis, and set theory. So somehow it’s working despite not having some perfect plan handed down by central authority. Hmm.

sakex•about 3 hours ago

Incredible to see my high school mentioned here

jeffbee•about 3 hours ago

OK, also pretty wild to just say "typical Swiss high school" without mentioning the selective system that steers people into and, overwhelmingly, away from the collèges.

GaryBluto•about 3 hours ago

> Switzerland is apparently a federation of federations.

And three republics! Geneva, Ticino, and Neuchâte.

jeffbee•about 3 hours ago

Well, without advocating that municipalities would be compelled to use it, isn't there at least some national service that they could opt into? I am sure that most of the red on this map is because it's a cinch to get Microsoft or Google to host your email. Of course in California we consider GSuite itself to be the green choice.

apnorton•about 4 hours ago

> TBQH it's crazy to have 2,100 distinct choices.

It's crazy to have 2100 distinct municipalities? The site isn't showing "here are 2100 different email hosts that municipalities in Switzerland use," but rather "here are the 2100 municipalities in Switzerland, and if you click you can see what host each one uses."

There's plenty of overlap, just from a cursory look.

toast0•29 minutes ago

I dunno. I live in washington state, in a county, a city, a fire district, a public utility district, a library district, a park district, a school district, a transportation district, and probably one or two other things. Some of them share borders with the city, but not all of them, and my city happens to be an island which makes sharing borders easy.

There's lots of reasons to separate municipal agencies, even if they cover the same geography, so it doesn't surpise me that each canton has about 100 municpal agencies.

nelox•about 4 hours ago

Freedom

DANmode•about 2 hours ago

What improvement?

jeffbee•about 1 hour ago

You wouldn't end up contracting with some weird local nerds for critical systems?

dewey•about 1 hour ago

It doesn’t say that each of the services they are using is some local small ISP, the whole point is to show they are also using large US companies.

Also, it would probably be easier to get a real human on the phone or proper support from the local nerds compared to Google.

DANmode•about 1 hour ago

I’ll take rsync.net

over OneDrive,

all day long.

As one example.

applfanboysbgon•39 minutes ago

God forbid anybody support local businesses rather than homogenizing entire nations into a single point of failure for each service.