> 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.