I’m a judge. Big tech just turned public truth into a subscription service

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.When a citizen needs to check a property deed, clear a lien, or resolve an estate after a family member passes away, they face immediate convenience fees and subscription rates. In Virginia, restrictions on the state electronic database have faced lawsuits because they stop the public from sharing downloaded files. As detailed by Courthouse News Service, these restrictive terms of access have drawn massive legal challenges from major news publishers who argue that blocking the dissemination of new civil complaints functions as an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech. A basic civic right is becoming a permanent corporate tax on everyday families. This fee-based system creates an asset bias that hurts independent citizens who cannot afford ongoing access to their own public records. Outsourcing these records also makes our legal system fragile. Moving decentralized county files into centralized corporate data centers creates a single target for cyberattacks and vendor mistakes. This structural vulnerability was put on full display when Thomson Reuters revealed a massive cyberattack on its C-Track court case management software. The incident exposed a subset of highly sensitive appellate court records, personal identifying details, and potentially redacted files across twelve U.S. states and Canada. A single data breach can freeze real estate markets, delay court dates, and lock citizens out of their own documents. When public entities hand control to a few private contractors, a stable system becomes weak.Beyond simple storage, the introduction of automated systems brings severe cybersecurity dangers to the foundation of the judiciary. Private cloud architecture opens the door to sophisticated ransomware attacks that can take entire county judicial operations offline for weeks. When a municipal court loses control of its physical server infrastructure, it loses the ability to guarantee the chain of custody for digital evidence. A compromised network allows bad actors to exploit software vulnerabilities, leaving public property records and corporate filings exposed to unauthorized manipulation.The integration of artificial intelligence tools into these private cloud platforms introduces an even quieter threat. As we see with the current debate on the rapidity of development and adoption, the courts are not immune. When court systems use private software to automatically summarize, index, or redact legal documents, they hand the narrative over to algorithms. AI models are prone to errors, often misinterpreting complex legal text or leaving out vital case details during automated processing. If an algorithm incorrectly indexes a property boundary dispute or leaves a crucial judgment out of a digital summary, the official legal record becomes distorted. Because these software programs operate as proprietary corporate secrets, independent researchers and local attorneys cannot easily audit or fix these systematic errors.Furthermore, software-driven indexing fundamentally changes how public truth is managed. When a private company owns the search engine for local legal history, its software decides what you can find. Small changes to the software can make older property disputes or historic decisions nearly invisible to the public. This destroys the transparent tracking needed to hold local institutions accountable. It favors large institutional groups that can afford specialized tools, while leaving average citizens completely in the dark.ANTHROPIC’S CEO CRIED WOLF ON AI. NOW HE WANTS WASHINGTON TO KILL HIS RIVALSCurrent state and federal safety measures are not strong enough to stop this commercial drift. While states like Virginia manage targeted preservation programs through the Library of Virginia, these local safety nets focus primarily on basic physical restoration rather than dictating strict, free-access digital software standards. At the federal level, agencies like the National Historical Publications and Records Commission offer small grants for digital access, but their funding pools are heavily constrained. Existing cybersecurity baselines from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency focus broadly on critical private infrastructure rather than protecting public constitutional archives from long-term tech monopoly lock-in.Protecting public history requires a complete overhaul of how we approach municipal technology infrastructure. Instead of relying on passive grant pools, Congress must establish a formal public utility model for local judicial data storage. We need federal legislation modeled on the transparency goals of the National Archives and Records Administration that conditions municipal technology grants on one absolute rule: any public record migrated to a cloud network must remain permanently un-paywalled and universally accessible. By funding local public court registries to develop and host their own secure, open-source digitization networks internally rather than leasing access from a handful of private contractors, we can safeguard the integrity of our legal history and guarantee that public truth remains a free utility for everyone.Eric Wargotz is a practicing physician, pathology professor, and Maryland civic leader who writes frequently on foreign policy, national security economics, and political strategy. The views expressed may not represent those of his affiliates.