Across the country, local county courts face high storage costs and aging systems. To solve this, many local governments are moving their records to private, out-of-state cloud networks. The North Carolina Judicial Branch recently shifted its entire statewide court system to the cloud. While this is sold to taxpayers as a simple efficiency upgrade, it is actually a major shift in public governance. It turns essential public history into a profit-driven corporate asset.

I have served as the president of a county commission, the president of a regional council, and currently as a judge in the Maryland judiciary. I see this transition from both the financial side and the legal side. A county leader must balance local budgets, but a judge must protect the court record. Outsourcing these records to private vendors creates long-term structural problems. It directly harms household economics. Public records belong to the citizens, yet private tech companies are putting this data behind digital paywalls.