No bureaucrat ever got fired because their dot-com division had a lackluster quarter.

You won't see division managers at the Department of Labor sweating an IPO. And the friendly folks at the state revenue department have never spent 48 hours straight hammering out code to hit an e-commerce launch date.

So it shouldn't come as a shock that government Web sites have fallen behind commercial pages in utility and user-friendliness.

While many companies depend on their sites to attract visitors and keep them clicking, government agencies have little motive to make Web pages inviting.

Still, it's disappointing to learn exactly how bad dot-gov sites can be. A new study from Brown University suggests our public servants are having trouble providing even the most basic services Web users have come to expect.

Brown's Taubman Center for Public Policy surveyed 1,813 government sites, including 36 federal government sites, 61 federal court sites and 1,716 state government sites. Researchers were looking for the fundamentals, including contact information, external links, privacy policies and the like.

They also evaluated the level of useful services offered , checked into access for the disabled and looked for multimedia features.

The results weren't pretty. Just 7 percent of the sites posted privacy policies, with state government sites among the chief offenders. While the Federal Trade Commission has chastened private Web sites to disclose their data-collection practices, just 1 in 4 of the federal government sites surveyed could claim to do the same.

Only 15 percent of government sites offer special access to the disabled, a figure that would be criminal if it applied to government buildings.

And barely 1 in 5 in five government sites gives visitors a chance to actually do something, such as filling out a form, requesting a hearing or paying a traffic fine.

Just 34 percent of sites posted answers to frequently asked questions. That might not seem like much of an oversight, but most people who visit government sites aren't there to check out the official seal. They've got questions, and probably fairly common ones.

Brown researchers may have been setting the bar a bit high in complaining that just 5 percent of the sites included multimedia clips. But it shouldn't be too much to ask for a phone number, and nearly 1 in 10 government sites don't post one.

This sort of performance doesn't bode well for those who would have the government enforce privacy rules and other regulations online.

Even lame commercial sites have left high-level government sites in the dust. Proof of this point is only a typo away, from whitehouse.gov--one of the lowest scorers in Brown's study--to whitehouse.com, a porn site.

Whitehouse.com has 15 live video feeds, live chat, streaming audio and downloadable movies with "sensual sounds." Whitehouse.gov offers press releases, a bit of history and some pictures of the house. You can listen to the president's weekly radio address, but it didn't seem at all sensual to me.

There are exceptions, of course. My local county government, for example, did an excellent job of posting last month's primary election results online as they were being counted.

And other agencies have learned that the hard work that goes into providing a service online is ultimately cheaper than conducting that business in person.