> Germany is ridiculously far behind. It's partly because of federalism, but mostly because of the fear of the state and desire for extreme levels of privacy.

I think you are missing the elephant in the room: our (German) complete and utter incompetence when it comes to software development.

Declaring taxes for my business still involves mailing many dead trees around the country, and I hate it. But what's the alternative, sinking billions of euros into a public software project that might be as crappy as Toll Collect?