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© Joe Casad, Editor in Chief

© Joe Casad, Editor in Chief

Article from Issue 233/2020
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This column is about IT, not about politics. The names of politicians sometimes come up in this space – mostly because of something they did that is related to IT, but it is never my goal to descend into the political fray.

Dear Reader,

This column is about IT, not about politics. The names of politicians sometimes come up in this space – mostly because of something they did that is related to IT, but it is never my goal to descend into the political fray. In fact, I honestly believe the whole reason the political fray exists is because it is much easier to reduce everything to politics than it is to deal directly with the perplexing and often unsolvable issues that politicians face: social responsibility, economics, national security, personal liberty. A collection of opinions on these perplexing topics is often encapsulated into a convenient bundle plan that is associated with a particular politician, and when you say you like that politician, you imply some level of comfort with that politician's opinion bundle. Seems like it rarely ever gets much deeper than that.

On February 13, a federal judge issued an injunction to stop work on the massive Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud project for the US Department of Defense (DoD). Amazon had brought the suit in an attempt to prevent the $10 billion project from going to the contract winner, Microsoft. In the USA, a flurry of lawsuit threats often follows the awarding of a gigantic government contract. A common legal theory behind many of these post-award legal maneuvers is that the contract was awarded in "bad faith," meaning that the government agency was acting with animus toward one of the losing bidders. These lawsuits hardly ever work, because bad faith is very difficult to prove, and the legal standard is that it must be proved convincingly – mere inference or innuendo are not enough, and even incompetence or negligence isn't a compelling argument. You really have to show that the government acted with malice. So usually it doesn't work. However, legal experts say the judge wouldn't have issued the injunction unless the case had at least some likelihood of succeeding in court. Amazon Web Services had to put a $42 million deposit, which they will forfeit if it is proven that the injunction to stop the project was wrongly issued.

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