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The discourse over PACER fees recapitulates a very common public policy conundrum, and we should all be more thoughtful about discussing it. In the municipalit

by tptacek 5mo ago

The discourse over PACER fees recapitulates a very common public policy conundrum, and we should all be more thoughtful about discussing it. In the municipality where I live, we're statutorily required to replace lead service lines[†] within the next 5-10 years (I forget how many). The municipality replaces the trunk lines, and homeowners are required to replace the last hop at their own (significant) expense. Naturally, people are extremely upset about this. They're all being forced to spend a bunch of money, out of the blue. They all want the municipality to pay for their own service line replacement. Other municipalities are doing this. But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other, because the ultimate source of funds for the things the municipality pays for is our property tax levy. In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own. A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession. That doesn't mean I think it's great that PACER charges. Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic. But it's also very cheap. I'd imagine that most of the use cases for which it isn't below the cost noise floor are cases that serve professions, in which case I have to ask what the public policy case is for subsidizing those uses. I don't know, things are complicated. [†] Added context: lead service lines in Chicagoland aren't necessarily immediately problematic, because the water management department here carefully manages the supply to ensure lead is mineralized; if you test your lead-service tap water for lead, you won't find any.

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
ipython 5mo ago
The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall. Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens. I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.
- hypersoar 5mo ago
  Federal judicial opinions are readily available online. The circuit courts and Supreme Court--i.e., the courts which actually establish precedent--post all of their opinions on their own websites. If your concern is knowing what courts (at least federal courts, where PACER is used) are saying so that you can follow the law, it's all out there for free. What PACER hosts is the rest of the case records: exhibits, briefs, motions, etc.
- nickpsecurity 5mo ago
  We should always be allowed to read and know the law we're required to follow. Preferrably for free or easily.
  - fireflash38 5mo ago
    It's insane to me that this isn't the default view. How are you supposed to follow the law if you don't know what it is? Putting a price on it just makes it is basically criminalizing being poor. Which is what we arguably have already considering the state of public defenders, jail, bail system, and how often the rich get off scot free for their crimes.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class. I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.
  - iamnothere 5mo ago
    Except for corporate lawyers and a handful of highly successful biglaw attorneys, the law profession isn’t as profitable as it once was. Student loans and creeping costs have done a lot of damage. Same with many doctors who are having to go work for group practices owned by PE firms. Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independent attorneys who don’t mingle with execs and politicians at the country club.
cvalka 5mo ago
[flagged]
- tptacek 5mo ago
  I am in fact not well educated. I earned (barely) a diploma from St. Ignatius College Prep (AMDG!) in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and that's it. So I think you have to grade me on a curve.
stult 5mo ago
> A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself. The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say. Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.
gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago
> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession. Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter. I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.
  - SkiFire13 5mo ago
    $30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place
    - sokoloff 5mo ago
      It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
  Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated. PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth. The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.
awinter-py 5mo ago
this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses (per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/ https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/) courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy
- tptacek 5mo ago
  My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.
  - toomuchtodo 5mo ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 > I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-veterans-legal-services-program-v-united-states/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-... Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.
rayiner 5mo ago
Excellent analogy. One note. As a result of a settlement, PACER waives usage fees under $30 per quarter, apparently on the theory that lawyers will rack up more than that while the general public won’t. Doesn’t totally fix the problem but it does move in that direction.
BobbyTables2 5mo ago
The two aren’t quite identical. The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract. The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates. It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.
- ozozozd 5mo ago
  Exactly what I was going to say. And exactly what’s intended: for someone to make money.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  The other side of that coin is that the homeowner is paying their own money and is therefore going to actually negotiate or shop around for the best price. Whereas the government is spending someone else's money and then the way the person choosing who to award the contract to gets to have more money in their own pocket is under the table.
  - bebe83939 5mo ago
    Plus homeowner may decide to skip electric utility completely, and go with isolated home solar. Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).
    - mistrial9 5mo ago
      other extreme case, California, where electricity costs are a large multiple of US averages, and the utility company owns military equipment. PG&E + minions monitor every connection, and charge to connect to the grid. High quality solar cannot be connected to the grid by regulation, not law, unless supervised by PG&E and minions. Naturally the regulations de facto equate to a monthly bill in a certain non-free range, no matter how much effort the client site makes.
divbzero 5mo ago
I agree with the analysis of lead service lines, but serving static files is lot cheaper than replacing underground pipes—so much cheaper that I think it’s qualitatively different.
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
> But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero. If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens: > Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. ...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it infrequently. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them. Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it. Also, this isn't right even for the service lines: > In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own. As a minor point, municipalities get their revenue predominantly from property tax, which is collected from property owners. The main issue is that the outlay is a fixed cost. The cost of replacing the service line will generally be similar for a $200k house as for a $2M house. Meanwhile taxes are collected in proportion to property value or income. If you tax everyone by even a flat X percent in order to give everyone a flat Y dollar amount benefit, the result is a progressive effective rate curve, because everyone gets e.g. a $10,000 benefit but a lower income person is paying $2500 in tax while a higher income person is paying $25,000, making the lower income person's net transfers to the government not just low but negative.
charcircuit 5mo ago
Hosting files is practically free in 2026. Cost is not a problem here.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  That's not what PACER fees pay for.
  - charcircuit 4mo ago
    Being able to upload new files? That's also cheap.
IIAOPSW 5mo ago
As a non-attorney that has also used PACER, I don't think of it in quite these terms. Sure maybe there's some level of public subsidy by making it free, but like you say, relative to the legal profession that subsidy per lawyer is at the noise floor. On the other hand, the value of making it free to people outside the legal profession is well worth the degree to which we'd be subsidizing the people in it. For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).
- tptacek 5mo ago
  Right, but I fixate on the fact that we could easily solve the journalism problem without making it free. Just raise the free tier cap. Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)
rootusrootus 5mo ago
The water line cost should be spread amongst whoever was allowed to vote to make it happen. If non-homeowners were allowed to force homeowners to upgrade, they can help fund it.
- rootusrootus 5mo ago
  Oh my, got a downvote for that. Someone always thinks homeowners are out to spite the world and should be punished for the privilege. Never change, HN, never change.
fireflash38 5mo ago
I think there are clear benefits to having neighbors and your general community not lead poisoned. So yeah, I think that cost should be split among the entire municipality. I find it interesting that you have such a libertarian viewpoint on the one... But not the other. Is this not a direct government monopoly?
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
At the very least the town could front the water/sewer project with a myriad of financial instruments and then let people pay over time, credit those who didn't need it, etc, etc. That's what they do when they actually give a crap about getting the project done. I seen it with my own eyes when they took everyone off well/septic around here. Buuuut, that doesn't accomplish the secondary goal of incentivizing the departure of black grandma who has crappy landscaping or car part out guy or whoever else owns their own house and won't be kicked by rent but whose means and standard of living are below the vision of some snooty Chicago suburb. There's always that undertone to these sorts of things. And if it's not that there's some local business connections that are angling for things to be structured a given way. The dirt work guy with a cousin on the board would much rather see the town force people to incur thousands of $5k jobs that he'll surely get a cut of rather than have to bid a single contract with the same or less profit that he will not necessarily win. PACER (mostly, of course they don't want to give the public a tour of the sausage factory) isn't juggling 2nd and 3rd tier goals that are so objectionable they can't be talked about like your municipality is. And frankly I think PACER should be free specifically to enable bulk access so that all sorts of parties can sift through it, present the data, fact check against it, perform meta analysis, etc, etc.
ProllyInfamous 5mo ago
>Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic You would really enjoy reading Chief Justice Roberts' end of 2023 State of the US Federal Courts paper [†][ <6 pages ]. He discusses how their system has always been antiquated, resistant to change... but how significantly LLMs are going to change commoners' (like us!) access to the judicial system. There are also many humorous musings about past Justices' hatred of new technology, and that ~"if some former Justices could they'd have gotten rid of most associates, too; but they were still technologically necessary"~. [†] <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-endreport.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...> ---- My own forty-something brother is currently a state-level judge, and he still uses a typewriter, by choice, for more-privileged correspondence. State of our times, l-onestar.
lukeschlather 5mo ago
We know where all the money in this system is: it's in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Each of them has revenue over $3B, individually. Presumably they have some lesser-known competitors. PACER fees are $150M. What percentage of PACER fees are paid by LexisNexis and Westlaw anyway in the course of their data ingestion? I'm not sure it really matters, we could simply restructure with a new tax on value-add services like LexisNexis that pulls in $200M, make PACER free, and everyone would be happier, probably including the value-add legal service providers.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  Wait why are we taxing LexisNexis? Making PACER free makes sense (though, again: doing that is regressive); it's a government-run service that is the system of record for court filings.
  - lukeschlather 4mo ago
    You asserted that we need the money PACER fees bring in - taxing businesses like LexisNexis seems like a way to get the same kind of money that wouldn't be regressive, if we really need to replace that revenue, and it comes from more or less the same place, without being paid by people who can't afford it.
    - tptacek 4mo ago
      The federal government can apply fee structures to services it offers. It cannot in fact just randomly point at things private organizations do and tax them.
      - lukeschlather 4mo ago
        Really? Here are 3 examples, I'm not sure what you mean, Congress has extremely broad taxing authority. If what I suggest is unconstitutional (I'm curious to hear your justification for that) they could probably do it by putting terms of use on the PACER data, have a paid tier specifically for orgs that resell the data. * Sports gambling excise tax: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/sports-wagering https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax * Indoor tanning services: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/excise-tax-on-indoor-tanning-services-frequently-asked-questions https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...
adampunk 5mo ago
The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay. This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.
- tptacek 5mo ago
  Again: PACER fees do not simply pay for the marginal cost of delivering a static file.
  - adampunk 5mo ago
    Right, but 1: We already pay for the fixed costs and 2: the real marginal cost--however you want to measure it--is still closer to 0 than 10 cents.
    - tptacek 5mo ago
      No, it pays for costs unrelated to serving static content. It's a use tax. The fees do not entirely have to do with paying for a website.
      - adampunk 4mo ago
        That’s right. And use taxes can and should be calibrated to not just collect money but achieve public policy objectives. If the real marginal cost were close to 10 cents a page, we might be able to argue that funding the system other ways would be more distortionary but it’s not. We have decided with lots of static file services (including Supreme Court opinions) that the right use tax is 0, because zero-cost access is a desirable quality in itself.
greyface- 5mo ago
> straightforwardly regressive Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society. Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.

by tptacek 5mo ago

deleted 5mo ago

[deleted]

ipython 5mo ago

The problem is - we are all required to abide by the law. And the law is at least partially determined by precedent established by previous court cases. But those cases are behind a paywall. Yes everything costs money. But we expect that the government would provide services for the greater good of its citizens. I can step foot in some of the greatest museums in the world for free in downtown dc. As a citizen I can get (and have) a reading card for the Library of Congress. For free. Are these services being provided by volunteers? No. My tax dollars pay for it. So should it fund electronic record keeping for legal proceedings.

hypersoar 5mo ago
Federal judicial opinions are readily available online. The circuit courts and Supreme Court--i.e., the courts which actually establish precedent--post all of their opinions on their own websites. If your concern is knowing what courts (at least federal courts, where PACER is used) are saying so that you can follow the law, it's all out there for free. What PACER hosts is the rest of the case records: exhibits, briefs, motions, etc.
nickpsecurity 5mo ago
We should always be allowed to read and know the law we're required to follow. Preferrably for free or easily.
- fireflash38 5mo ago
  It's insane to me that this isn't the default view. How are you supposed to follow the law if you don't know what it is? Putting a price on it just makes it is basically criminalizing being poor. Which is what we arguably have already considering the state of public defenders, jail, bail system, and how often the rich get off scot free for their crimes.
tptacek 5mo ago
You're almost there but not completing the circuit. Could tax dollars pay for "free" PACER access? Absolutely they could. But is that policy distributionally (a) regressive, (b) progressive, or (c) neutral? The answer is probably (a). The tax dollars come out of everybody's pocket. The benefits accrue disproportionately to a wealthy professional class. I think we're close to a pretty nice balance in the status quo: RECAP, and a free tier. If it's me, what you do is jack the free tier up from $30 to $1000.
- iamnothere 5mo ago
  Except for corporate lawyers and a handful of highly successful biglaw attorneys, the law profession isn’t as profitable as it once was. Student loans and creeping costs have done a lot of damage. Same with many doctors who are having to go work for group practices owned by PE firms. Free PACER access might actually help average people get better legal representation by reducing the cost burden on the small independent attorneys who don’t mingle with execs and politicians at the country club.

cvalka 5mo ago

[flagged]

tptacek 5mo ago
I am in fact not well educated. I earned (barely) a diploma from St. Ignatius College Prep (AMDG!) in Chicago in the mid-1990s, and that's it. So I think you have to grade me on a curve.

stult 5mo ago

> A similar dilemma faces PACER. Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. One of those protectionist policies is charging for PACER itself. The costs of running PACER are absolutely trivial in comparison to the costs of running the judiciary. To the point that even bringing the point up is disingenuous to the point that it discredits everything else you say. Case law is law. People are required to obey the law. They should be able to access the law so they can know how to follow it. It's that simple.

gucci-on-fleek 5mo ago

> Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. Court records can, of course, be made "free". But nothing is actually free. To make those records free, you have to take money from the general fund, which means the tax payments of people who have nothing to do with the legal profession are... funding the legal profession. Couldn't you just add a "are you a lawyer" checkbox, and only charge a fee if you check it? It would be trivial to lie here, but I doubt that many lawyers would want to risk getting caught defrauding the government when doing so would only save them a few thousand dollars a year.

tptacek 5mo ago
It's easy to come up with practical segmentation strategies and we should pursue them. An obvious one is jacking up the free tier, from $30/quarter to something much higher, like $1000/quarter. I mean, maybe the right answer is just to make the whole thing free. I don't know. I just know it's more complicated than the standard message board discourse suggests.
- SkiFire13 5mo ago
  $30/quarter doesn't look like a "free tier" in the first place
  - sokoloff 5mo ago
    It is. If you incur less than $30 in PACER charges in a quarter, they waive the bill.
NoMoreNicksLeft 5mo ago
Lawyers don't use PACER. They'll have a LexisNexis or Westlaw terminal. That gets them all of the rulings and so forth, but annotated. PACER is more or less journalists, activists, and so forth. The fees PACER charges doesn't reflect the cost that the government bears to make it available (it's much higher). It's a poor service, seemingly designed to discourage its own use. And the bureaucracy within the court system obligated to provide it seems to feel that it's far more than a burden but even an intrusion into matters that the courts would keep from the public, were it allowed.

awinter-py 5mo ago

this is right if pacer is expensive to operate for a real reason but 1) it has high revenue which 2) is required to go to expenses, which 3) it may not be going to expenses (per freelaw project, at least https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/ https://free.law/2016/11/14/pacer-revenue/) courtlistener is providing a much better service at no cost to the public through donations; it's reasonable to say 'govt is required to feed new data to courtlistener and friends', gov doesn't have to operate pacer anymore, everyone is happy

tptacek 5mo ago
My expectation would be that the costs of operating the PACER system encompass a lot of basic costs of handling filing and docket management that aren't relevant to passive consumers of PACER, but that don't have a clean interface to charge at otherwise, in much the same way that gas taxes are in significant part a tax to fund maintenance of roadways.
- toomuchtodo 5mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24086570 > I'm the director of Free Law Project. For the case mentioned in the article we actually did a full expert testimony figuring out roughly how much per page it'd cost to run PACER using AWS GovCloud and a handful of other assumptions. It was...half a ten thousandth of a penny per page, IIRC: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-veterans-legal-services-program-v-united-states/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/4214664/52/15/national-... Government’s PACER Fees Are Too High, Federal Circuit Says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24085158 - August 2020 (149 comments)
  - tptacek 5mo ago
    That's missing my point. I too believe that the cost of serving static files is effectively epsilon. But that's not all PACER fees pay for.

rayiner 5mo ago

Excellent analogy. One note. As a result of a settlement, PACER waives usage fees under $30 per quarter, apparently on the theory that lawyers will rack up more than that while the general public won’t. Doesn’t totally fix the problem but it does move in that direction.

BobbyTables2 5mo ago

The two aren’t quite identical. The municipality could service all the homes and pay for it with taxes, probably using their own people or a negotiated contract. The private (and usually no -savvy) individual has much less negotiating power and is going to get taken to the cleaners by a plumber. Three houses in a street are likely to have 3 different plumbers on 3 different dates. It’s just like that the cost per square foot to pave a single driveway vs the entire sidewalk or foundations for a whole neighborhood.

ozozozd 5mo ago
Exactly what I was going to say. And exactly what’s intended: for someone to make money.
AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
The other side of that coin is that the homeowner is paying their own money and is therefore going to actually negotiate or shop around for the best price. Whereas the government is spending someone else's money and then the way the person choosing who to award the contract to gets to have more money in their own pocket is under the table.
- bebe83939 5mo ago
  Plus homeowner may decide to skip electric utility completely, and go with isolated home solar. Extreme case is south africa, blackout 30% of time, and people are not allowed local solars (it makes goverment look bad).
  - mistrial9 5mo ago
    other extreme case, California, where electricity costs are a large multiple of US averages, and the utility company owns military equipment. PG&E + minions monitor every connection, and charge to connect to the grid. High quality solar cannot be connected to the grid by regulation, not law, unless supervised by PG&E and minions. Naturally the regulations de facto equate to a monthly bill in a certain non-free range, no matter how much effort the client site makes.

divbzero 5mo ago

I agree with the analysis of lead service lines, but serving static files is lot cheaper than replacing underground pipes—so much cheaper that I think it’s qualitatively different.

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago

> But the thing here is: there's no free money. We all pay for the service line replacement one way or the other Which is a major difference between that and PACER, since they're serving text and the marginal cost of more people having access to it is essentially zero. If you make the homeowners pay for the service line replacement, the number of service lines that will be replaced is the same. If you make the public pay for access to the law, this happens: > Overwhelmingly, PACER is used by attorneys, who are generally well-compensated professionals with a whole host of protectionist policies insulating them from market forces. ...because everyone else is priced out by the fees, or even just the friction of having to configure payments for someone who is only going to use it infrequently. Which means the general public loses out on having access to something it would have a negligible marginal cost to give them. Imagine, for example, an open source project to search or otherwise process court opinions, which then needs access to all of them. If the government is charging per page, that's completely infeasible. If there is a public torrent of all the opinions, people get to do interesting things they currently can't. And this is not just public information but legal precedent that everyone is expected to comply with -- and yet is being charged to even read it. Also, this isn't right even for the service lines: > In fact, having the municipality pay for homeowner service line replacement is straightforwardly regressive: it's a subsidy to homeowners, paid in part out of the pockets of people who don't own. As a minor point, municipalities get their revenue predominantly from property tax, which is collected from property owners. The main issue is that the outlay is a fixed cost. The cost of replacing the service line will generally be similar for a $200k house as for a $2M house. Meanwhile taxes are collected in proportion to property value or income. If you tax everyone by even a flat X percent in order to give everyone a flat Y dollar amount benefit, the result is a progressive effective rate curve, because everyone gets e.g. a $10,000 benefit but a lower income person is paying $2500 in tax while a higher income person is paying $25,000, making the lower income person's net transfers to the government not just low but negative.

charcircuit 5mo ago

Hosting files is practically free in 2026. Cost is not a problem here.

tptacek 5mo ago
That's not what PACER fees pay for.
- charcircuit 4mo ago
  Being able to upload new files? That's also cheap.

IIAOPSW 5mo ago

As a non-attorney that has also used PACER, I don't think of it in quite these terms. Sure maybe there's some level of public subsidy by making it free, but like you say, relative to the legal profession that subsidy per lawyer is at the noise floor. On the other hand, the value of making it free to people outside the legal profession is well worth the degree to which we'd be subsidizing the people in it. For example, journalists. There's enormous investigative journalism value in the documents that have been filed in court. People say all sorts of shit in affidavits which turns out to be relevant outside the context they intended it for. PACER should be free, if nothing else than for the public interest value of its content (outside as well as inside the court).

tptacek 5mo ago
Right, but I fixate on the fact that we could easily solve the journalism problem without making it free. Just raise the free tier cap. Making PACER entirely free is regressive, absent some new scheme to single out the lawyers (like a dedicated lawyer tax or something, which runs into constitutional problems.)

rootusrootus 5mo ago

The water line cost should be spread amongst whoever was allowed to vote to make it happen. If non-homeowners were allowed to force homeowners to upgrade, they can help fund it.

rootusrootus 5mo ago
Oh my, got a downvote for that. Someone always thinks homeowners are out to spite the world and should be punished for the privilege. Never change, HN, never change.

fireflash38 5mo ago

I think there are clear benefits to having neighbors and your general community not lead poisoned. So yeah, I think that cost should be split among the entire municipality. I find it interesting that you have such a libertarian viewpoint on the one... But not the other. Is this not a direct government monopoly?

cucumber3732842 5mo ago

At the very least the town could front the water/sewer project with a myriad of financial instruments and then let people pay over time, credit those who didn't need it, etc, etc. That's what they do when they actually give a crap about getting the project done. I seen it with my own eyes when they took everyone off well/septic around here. Buuuut, that doesn't accomplish the secondary goal of incentivizing the departure of black grandma who has crappy landscaping or car part out guy or whoever else owns their own house and won't be kicked by rent but whose means and standard of living are below the vision of some snooty Chicago suburb. There's always that undertone to these sorts of things. And if it's not that there's some local business connections that are angling for things to be structured a given way. The dirt work guy with a cousin on the board would much rather see the town force people to incur thousands of $5k jobs that he'll surely get a cut of rather than have to bid a single contract with the same or less profit that he will not necessarily win. PACER (mostly, of course they don't want to give the public a tour of the sausage factory) isn't juggling 2nd and 3rd tier goals that are so objectionable they can't be talked about like your municipality is. And frankly I think PACER should be free specifically to enable bulk access so that all sorts of parties can sift through it, present the data, fact check against it, perform meta analysis, etc, etc.

ProllyInfamous 5mo ago

>Speaking as a nonlawyer who uses PACER kind of weirdly a lot, it's also not good; it's pretty archaic You would really enjoy reading Chief Justice Roberts' end of 2023 State of the US Federal Courts paper [†][ <6 pages ]. He discusses how their system has always been antiquated, resistant to change... but how significantly LLMs are going to change commoners' (like us!) access to the judicial system. There are also many humorous musings about past Justices' hatred of new technology, and that ~"if some former Justices could they'd have gotten rid of most associates, too; but they were still technologically necessary"~. [†] <https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-endreport.pdf https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...> ---- My own forty-something brother is currently a state-level judge, and he still uses a typewriter, by choice, for more-privileged correspondence. State of our times, l-onestar.

lukeschlather 5mo ago

We know where all the money in this system is: it's in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Each of them has revenue over $3B, individually. Presumably they have some lesser-known competitors. PACER fees are $150M. What percentage of PACER fees are paid by LexisNexis and Westlaw anyway in the course of their data ingestion? I'm not sure it really matters, we could simply restructure with a new tax on value-add services like LexisNexis that pulls in $200M, make PACER free, and everyone would be happier, probably including the value-add legal service providers.

tptacek 5mo ago
Wait why are we taxing LexisNexis? Making PACER free makes sense (though, again: doing that is regressive); it's a government-run service that is the system of record for court filings.
- lukeschlather 4mo ago
  You asserted that we need the money PACER fees bring in - taxing businesses like LexisNexis seems like a way to get the same kind of money that wouldn't be regressive, if we really need to replace that revenue, and it comes from more or less the same place, without being paid by people who can't afford it.
  - tptacek 4mo ago
    The federal government can apply fee structures to services it offers. It cannot in fact just randomly point at things private organizations do and tax them.
    - lukeschlather 4mo ago
      Really? Here are 3 examples, I'm not sure what you mean, Congress has extremely broad taxing authority. If what I suggest is unconstitutional (I'm curious to hear your justification for that) they could probably do it by putting terms of use on the PACER data, have a paid tier specifically for orgs that resell the data. * Sports gambling excise tax: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/sports-wagering https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_telephone_excise_tax * Indoor tanning services: https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed/excise-tax-on-indoor-tanning-services-frequently-asked-questions https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employe...

adampunk 5mo ago

The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay. This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.

tptacek 5mo ago
Again: PACER fees do not simply pay for the marginal cost of delivering a static file.
- adampunk 5mo ago
  Right, but 1: We already pay for the fixed costs and 2: the real marginal cost--however you want to measure it--is still closer to 0 than 10 cents.
  - tptacek 5mo ago
    No, it pays for costs unrelated to serving static content. It's a use tax. The fees do not entirely have to do with paying for a website.
    - adampunk 4mo ago
      That’s right. And use taxes can and should be calibrated to not just collect money but achieve public policy objectives. If the real marginal cost were close to 10 cents a page, we might be able to argue that funding the system other ways would be more distortionary but it’s not. We have decided with lots of static file services (including Supreme Court opinions) that the right use tax is 0, because zero-cost access is a desirable quality in itself.

greyface- 5mo ago

> straightforwardly regressive Fiscally? Sure. In terms of liberty? Absolutely not. We are talking about public access to law, which is foundational to a free society. Federal courts are not strictly limited by tax revenue in the same way that state courts are, and I am more sympathetic to this line of argument on the state level. Finding replacement revenue is a legitimate concern, but a secondary one due to the federal government's deficit spending privilege.