Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
If the premise is that you want to host data for people in Europe who don't want it to be under the control of the US then Frankfurt is a lower latency place to be than Virginia anyway.
Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
141–150 of 239 posts
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top. I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the cou…
Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff. Yes, this results in enshittification.
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#143We've known this since the Snowden leaks 13 years ago. In a couple of years there will probably be a president in the US that will be more palatable for the european political class and we'll all be able to go back to pretending this doesn't happen. After all the EU is too compromised energetically, militarily, industrially, burocratically and democratically to ever achieve independence. Talking about digital soverei…
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is not as simple as banking - people tend to want low-latency and high-speed connection which necessitate the data center to be in close proximity. Which basically means that founding a country with strong data protection laws somewhere in Antarctic won't get you many clients in Europe.
that's a psyop from the cloud evangelism era. a few hundred milliseconds of latency make fuck all any difference for 95% of things, even voice/video calls.
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's mind blowing that government bureaucrats would be permitted to use commercial providers for official business at all. The provider being foreign is merely the cherry on top. I was going to ask why something like mail.gov.nl doesn't exist but it turns out [0] (edit: wikipedia is full of lies) that they don't have a reserved second level domain for official government services to use? Is this really one of the cou…
Privatization: in much of the (neo)liberal West, it is seen as better to use commercial providers. They're supposed to be cheaper and better, because they're not using (union) civil service staff. Yes, this results in enshittification.
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#146In the meantime Belgian public sector will use Google Cloud, it seems: https://ittech-pulse.com/news/smals-partners-with-google-clo...
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore. And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)
UBS tried to hold for as long as they could, and the choice the US given them is "pay a fine (accrues daily) or be cut from world financial system run by dollar".
UBS ultimately paid a 780 million fine. The rest of Swiss banks followed suit immediately.
Many things in the world happen, and most of the dumb bullshit that happens is imposed by US. This naiivete has to stop, the times have changed, and you, you spefically are part of the problem.
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dude, seriously, what are you smoking? Some nutcases literally flew a plane into civillian buildings as a response to the works of these Washington minority.
I think you need to read more carefully, you are arguing against things you imagine I said. Write down what you believe you are objecting to, try to find that in the things I wrote.
...
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#149If a politically stable nation with a good international reputation were to guarantee government respect for data privacy for data centres housed on its soil and run by its companies, that nation could become the Swiss bankers of data. Rolling your own "digital sovereignty" is not going to be cheap for most nations, and many other nations simply won't be trusted by anyone, least of all their own citizens. It's a bit…
The more astonishing thing is that people regularly talk about this in the context of hosting providers when by far the more significant threat is mobile platforms. There are a zillion hosting companies, many of them outside the US. Now which mobile platform are you going to use that doesn't give one of two US companies root on your population's phones?
At the top of the trust scale is a self built desktop running fedora then way further down is my apple devices (iPads) and then even further down is my android phone.
Open source on hardware you control is the least worst option but since the hardware comes from abroad/countries I don’t trust much (including the US) not perfect.
Re: Digital Sovereignty Becomes an Imperative as the US Reads Dutch Emails
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...decided that they don’t want to bear the moral cost of it anymore. And of course the external pressure to loosen banking secrecy laws has been huge, particularly from the US e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UBS_tax_evasion_controversies
But ultimately the Swiss decides what Switzerland does, and the population deciding they didn't want that, was the deciding factor. Been pressure on Switzerland about that for a long time, from many countries, and in fact still there is, as many still think they're not doing enough. Not everything in the world happens because of the US :)
Wanna refuse? No problem. Of course you can. You're outside the US jurisdiction.
But every USD transaction you do is subject to, IIRC, 30% tax. Unless the US decides to block it altogether.