I think they should. Let’s kick off some meaningful economic growth in Europe and provide a counter to the increasingly hegemonic, anti-human US tech oligarchs that have reaped all of the financial rewards of algorithmic radicalization and surveillance capitalism for the past 20 or so years. Maybe Europe can imagine something better.
In Holland I see a lot of defeatist attitude. "US big tech is so entrenched we'll never get away". "European cloud will never be good enough". "There's nothing like Microsoft 365". At my work they don't even want to think about alternatives.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
Everyone wants to, and not just from the US, but China too. Digital imperialism is real but nobody is confident yet how to effectively fight it. India especially is kind of trapped because our IT service industry is deeply entwined with the US and our government doesn't know how to safely untangle it from the US without harming our economy.
>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.
It's more than just internet technology, though. Europe has no digital sovereignty at all. Every operating system is in US hands, most office and business software, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, all social media commonly used, and so on. The list is endless.
I guess they want to be just as good as the US. Whistle blowers showed that NSA has access to most US tech/data companies (Google, Apple, MS, Dropbox).
As they should. It’s an incredible opportunity to develop technology natively and by extension wealth. The US has proven in this one year that it’s not to be trusted let alone relied upon. Unfortunately the tide once set in motion cannot be u done and the damage done in this one year is irreparable, may be now the tech billionaires will speak up and to use a phrase from Carney - take the sign down from their windows
The tax authority in Norway alone employs 500 full-time software developers. If all of Europe followed France's example to adopt the UN Open Source Principles for all publicly funded development - and prioritized open formats + protocols + interoperability - it would within only a few years be possible to greatly improve software reliability for all nations.
French gov open source is a joke, single repo dump once from a zip file given by the contractor and then nothing. And that's when the source is provided, France Identité is closed source and Play Integrity dependent.
I've got no horse in this race, but, didn't they say the same things during the current US president's first term? Both about technology and defense. What came out of that?
With the current speed of things, Europe will need a hundred years to effectively and totally set free from the US digital dominance. You will know if this timeframe gets shorter if a torrent of change, news and enthusiasm floods almost any European company, either IT or not, mobilize vertical and horizontal government agencies and a large share of the population actively participates.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 72.8 ms ] threadHeadline could be “every country wants to end all reliance on US” and it would be the sane thing to do.
I think they hope that MAGA will just blow over somehow. I don't see that happening.
Why the difference?
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
Also O365 just sucks. We can do better. We've had better. Please stop using MS products and technology stacks.