> It's amazing to me that people will just blow by this point while accepting corporate monopolization of what should be a public resource.

I think it's more a matter of picking your battles. What are the things that our government does poorly, which should be handled better? Let's see... education, healthcare, science and arts funding, housing, wars, surveillance, immigration, highways and bridges, Amtrak...

It's hard enough to improve (for example) local transit, petitioning a dozen people across 1-3 agencies for a few tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of improvements. But to try to get Congress to implement a system affecting thousands of sites across all 50 states, across the NPS, USFS, USFWS, BLM, Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, etc... where do you even start with such a thing? Of all the letter, protests, petitions, voicemails, public meetings, etc. I've experienced, I've never once received a meaningful reply (much less actual positive change) from any politician higher than city-level. Our governments are just not set up to be responsive to regular citizens. You have to have a shit ton of money or power to matter at all.

When even organized nonprofits with established lobbies struggle with this -- a lot -- what is the average citizen supposed to do? Our lack of meaningful representation is a major systemic flaw of our so-called democracy, not something some rando on HN can single-handedly solve (unless, maybe, you're one of the major tech CEOs on here... hey Vercel or Cloudflare, wanna help us make a better reservation system and forever earn public gratitude? lol)

> It's better that the people who do this are punished. Either with criminal charges or with the removal of their ability to bid for future government contracts.

Is it that black and white? Recreation.gov isn't the failure that (say) Healthcare.gov or WhiteHouse.com (the petition site) was. In fact it works very well. And from the news article, apparently the lottery fees were supposed to pay for most of the website in lieu of an upfront fee (though there's some question about a questionable $120 million fee).

In terms of government digital efforts, honestly, this is probably the best one I've ever seen. Can't remember the last time it broke or crashed, and I've made dozens of reservations through it smoothly. And the cost to me... maybe $20/year?

> The government is a sucker client. They pay huge contracts, always on time, and never follow up after they get screwed.

Agreed. Part of our election cycles and extreme partisanship politics =/ Day to day services get deprioritized vs hot-button issues.

> And no, it's not better to just punt on this issue and throw even more money at a greedy rent seeking middleman.

I think a reasonable fix would to be just renegotiate the fees and give a larger portion to the parks, while still trickling some % to the contractor. Maybe open it up to a bidding process. But frankly I think this contractor is doing a much better job than the government itself could. The feds are terrible at making functional websites. Obama started some efforts and Biden is continuing them (Login.gov, the TSA systems) but they're still not very seamless. It's just not a part of their culture. Maybe that will change in time, but until then, I'd rather have an expensive but functional service than some ideologically purer but unusable system.