Opinion: Obama’s White House favors dumping more information on corporate servers

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An anxious minority of U.S. Internet users are divorcing themselves from Google. When one company can watch what we’re searching for, who we’re e-mailing, what we’re reading and where we’re going on a daily basis -- well, that’s just too much information for one company to have, according to some people.

Vivek Kundra, Obama’s chief information officer, is not in that crowd.

Kundra, who is managing the $79 billion the White House set aside to spend on technology, told Bloomberg that he’s looking to cut costs incurred by expensive, government-owned data centers.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Kundra said this week. “It costs a fortune, it’s duplicative and it’s an energy hog.”

Companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon already have huge numbers of servers dedicated to their products and storing user data. Perhaps the government could use some of those services. Last week, Kundra met with each of those companies.

Kundra didn’t say which company the feds might go with, but he did point out that Google and Microsoft recently opened programs for government. Last year, Los Angeles set up 30,000 city employees with Google’s e-mail system.

-- Mark Milian

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