Regardless of politics, it's still a good idea to try and avoid dependence on these globomegacorps that have revenues and market caps higher than the GDP of many countries. It seems like modern civilization is building toward an ultimate centralization of everything and we're just one catastrophic failure away from extreme societal problems of all kinds because of it.
Thats a good idea for any government and major org.
Data sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org.
Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house.
Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point.
Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff.
While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to.
EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
Reminder for those that don't click through: Microsoft killed the email account of an ICC prosecutor, at the request of Trump:
> According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May.
While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
It's quite funny that they will switch to german technology now, because I can think of no german service provider that would not immediately comply with any and all US sanctions.
The only way to combat this behavior by the United States is for the European Union to finally stand up for itself and take retaliatory measures against the US. Start sanctioning prominent Americans until the US agrees to cut it out.
For almost every organization, outsourcing has been the right choice. It's right for almost every international organization. Really, only with Trump's second election has it become too risky for some.
No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.
> No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO.
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?
It's always been an odd choice to build infra on services owned by companies from a country which doesn't recognise the ICC and, even worse, has a special law that if any of US service men were ever tried there, they will invade the Hague. (gotta love the good guys)
Why would the US choose to cede authority to the ICC here? If the US wishes to discipline its service members, they still can and do. Under no circumstances should any country allow a foreign entity to decide what its military can and cannot do.
That is the good electroshock that was needed to start doing good things.
But:
"Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure."
My intuition:
That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years.
At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences.
At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 39.2 ms ] threadData sovereignty is such a massively huge issue. But when some nameless market-droid can go "pay us more in 10 days or we purge everything", or "account disabled" - those can absolutely wreck an org.
Now, non-critical stuff happens. And use 3rd party services for those. The key there is cancellation isn't a big deal. But the moment they do turn critical, replicate in-house.
Also, keep in mind that the AP reported killing Hague's ICC contracts. Lots of misinformation, but this is the starting point.
https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
Good luck getting rid of MS dependency in the public sector. Migrating away all of the legacy systems is nigh impossible. Then you'd have to retrain all staff.
While this is not justified from an economic perspective one can only hope that these institutions have higher values to adhere to.
EDIT: This is great news, I should be more optimistic about this effort.
> According to Handelsblatt, the decision is to be seen against the backdrop of sanctions by the current US administration under President Donald Trump against employees such as Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Microsoft simply blocked his email access. He therefore had to switch to the Swiss email service Proton. Since the ICC is highly dependent on service providers like Microsoft, its work is being paralyzed, it was stated in May.
While there are clear financial wins too, basic sovereignty is at stake.
These are legally-binding sanctions, issued under the same authority as those levied against Putin and Russia for the invasion of Ukraine:
* ICC: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/impo...
* Russia: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/addr...
The ICC sanctions are politically unpopular in Europe, whereas the Russia sanctions are popular in Europe. But the email account was not closed simply "at the request of Trump." Companies face serious consequences if they do business with sanctioned persons or entities - that's what makes sanctions work.
Many years later - "Oh no! Not running our own data centres means our data is no longer fully in our control!"
Who would have thought it!
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?
But: "Zendis is part of an EU-level organisation that four EU countries founded on Tuesday with the aim of building sovereign digital infrastructure."
My intuition:
That is the usual European recipe for disaster. A public funded initiative to waste money in the usual way by giving it indirectly to consulting groups while producing nothing concrete and having to be scraped after a few years. At the same time, a big part of the money will be use to fund largely a big group of useless executives, representatives, communicators, and have countless workshops and conferences.
At the same time, almost zero money will go to the real existing Open Source project, their developers and maintainers.