A reference could be the cost of Estonian digital services which include e-signatures, and are reasonably efficient: https://e-estonia.com/e-governance-saves-money-and-working-hours/ “Estonian public sector annual costs for IT systems are 100M Euros in upkeep and 81M Euros in investments”
So in Estonia it’s ~1.3B spend for 7y. Switzerland is 7x larger population, and has higher salaries, let’s say 2x larger. This puts the cost at 18B Eur.
Putting a cost on each signature does not make sense of course, it’s probably just easier for the government to justify the spending this way, rather then discussing specifics of the budget.
This assumes that the costs scale with population size. I would naively assume that it is mostly fixed costs (developing the software, setting up the central servers).
Likely the provider of e-signatures would have to assume some sort of legal liability, hence costs scaling. Maybe even exponentially as they become a bigger and bigger target. But the intelligence and foresight of even the best legal team in the world plateaus.
If I read you correctly, the 100+81M in Estonia is for (i) the ENTIRE gvmt IT system (not just e-signatures) serving (ii) the population. Though I could not read the report in Estonian to verify. Switzerland’s is “up to 19 $bn” is specifically for e-signatures, only for within-gvmt exchanges afaik.
A reference could be the cost of Estonian digital services which include e-signatures, and are reasonably efficient:
https://e-estonia.com/e-governance-saves-money-and-working-hours/ “Estonian public sector annual costs for IT systems are 100M Euros in upkeep and 81M Euros in investments”
So in Estonia it’s ~1.3B spend for 7y. Switzerland is 7x larger population, and has higher salaries, let’s say 2x larger. This puts the cost at 18B Eur.
Putting a cost on each signature does not make sense of course, it’s probably just easier for the government to justify the spending this way, rather then discussing specifics of the budget.
This assumes that the costs scale with population size. I would naively assume that it is mostly fixed costs (developing the software, setting up the central servers).
Likely the provider of e-signatures would have to assume some sort of legal liability, hence costs scaling. Maybe even exponentially as they become a bigger and bigger target. But the intelligence and foresight of even the best legal team in the world plateaus.
If I read you correctly, the 100+81M in Estonia is for (i) the ENTIRE gvmt IT system (not just e-signatures) serving (ii) the population. Though I could not read the report in Estonian to verify. Switzerland’s is “up to 19 $bn” is specifically for e-signatures, only for within-gvmt exchanges afaik.