▲ 261 points
back
224 comments
Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king, which means all users of big tech are also under that same jurisdiction, including any and all private and public organisations in any country.
This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world.
Much like the diving head first first into AI uptake, the whole cloud mania thing coming home to roost.
If calling a war criminal a war criminal results in sanctions, could sanctions be the new tariffs? I don't want to give him ideas...
This should scare pretty much any organisation outside of the US.
One theory about developing countries was that if oil is found, it's naturally easier for a dictator to control, since it's a concentrated source of revenue. Just a small amount of mercenaries is enough. So there will be a series of dictators.
If there's no concentrated source of revenue, the people need to be involved and thus a more democratic path is likely.
With the internet and software, especially with platforms, you see this concentration of power effect. That then easily leads to certain kind of power dynamics. Ie just as a hypothetical example, if there's only a few closed conversation platforms, government can control them relatively easily.
> This is one of the reasons I think the mad king thinks that he can bully the rest of the world - because he can, by proxy, bully the rest of the world.
He has even bigger levers to pull unfortunately. Sanctions are this giant hammer that can be dropped on anyone and the weight of the US ensures compliance. When the ICC chief prosecutor was sanctioned it wasn't just US companies who gave in, like Microsoft. His UK bank also blocked him. Sooner or later in the chain of dependencies there will be something based in the US or relying on something based in the US. Your MSP, the airline you travel with, anything will be used against you if sanctions are transmitted like a disease to anyone giving you assistance. No company or country wants to risk being buried to fight the US on this.
> Essentially big tech is under the jurisdiction of the mad king,
and of the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the SEC etc.
"Would Europe ever hand over control of its national power grids to foreign companies bound by non-European law? Would we trust a foreign supplier’s guarantee for 99.999% uptime (which is the standard uptime SLA agreement of cloud providers) while at the same time a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power? Of course not."
EU already does this:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-p...
Yes, and not only for electricity and the cloud. Also for 5G networks:
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/
Bert Hubert is good at identifying problems like this, but his proposed approach is always to demand the EU pass new laws even when the problem is Europeans asking people in foreign jurisdictions to run everything for them because they can do it better, partly due to not being under EU control. The cause of the problem is presented as the solution.
The internet has a compressive effect on markets. Most markets can only sustain about 3-5 competitors before the number of choices becomes overwhelming and customers can no longer easily differentiate between them. If you offer your services over the internet, that means 3-5 competitors globally, and in turn that means hacking one of them can give you control over a huge chunk of the market. It also means it's easy to end up with all of those competitors being outside your jurisdiction if you aren't highly competitive.
Yeah Europe really needs to step up here. It's a huge economic block.
The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now, but the basics really should be doable. The newly launched EU DNS is a good start. Rules like taxpayer money needs to only fund open software etc need to be pushed. The large hosting providers need to be incentivized to build out more complete offerings that don't have gaping product holes vs big cloud etc.
Both China and the US are aggressively pushing homegrown & favouring their own players. Time for the EU to do the same
I agree with the rest, that it is all manageable, but at least:
> The whole chips fab thing may be a bridge too far for now
for this case, ASML, being Dutch, and crucial to essentially all cutting semiconductor production, gives Europe leverage.
That said, a bit like Biden & Trump banning the export of certain tech to China, it is a slippery slope. Past a certain point they're just forced to develop the tech themselves. Hopefully Europe won't be as short-sighted or wilfully-ignorant, and will capitalise on their advantage here- as you are very correct to point out the ultimate vulnerability.
Bridge too far? Are you aware that e.g., Germany delivers multiple key components to chip manufacturing? Namely Zeiss and Trumpf?
The bridge is right there, the EU just needs to cross it.
I agree with the argument, but...
> [Would we allow a situation where] a foreign power could force them anytime to cut Europe’s power?
We did just that with Russian gas imports. It took a massive effort to transition of these imports after Russia closed the tap.
And we replaced it with imports from the US. And most oil is from the Middle East, of course. Being completely energy independent is easier said than done.
It wasn't Russia who blew up the Nord Stream pipeline..
European digital sovereignty in email depends on having a decent FOSS email client, but the best we have is Thunderbird. I hope TB can make up for all those years of lost time and catch up with Outlook. From their emails it seems like the focus is to compete with Exchange and to build smartphone clients. Personally I just really hope they find time to deal with the absolutely shoddy search.
Not saying that Thunderbird is great, but ms Outlook has serious problems finding mails even for very specific keywords if it is older than a few months. They seem to hyper index recent mails and forget all else.
Ironically, I have set up thunderbird as a client for my exchange email just for archival, and it does much better finding them.
I never used an email client in my life, I don't personally know anyone who does it either.
I wonder what's the distribution between people who use clients vs just web.
I'm experimenting with both Thunderbird and MailSpring. The latter looks like a much more natural fit for someone used to GMail/OWA like me.
Honestly why?
Why does "digital sovereignty" have to rely on stuff like "FOSS email client"
Honestly, as much of FOSS has its importance, focusing exclusively on open source solutions is probably part of why things don't go ahead
Honestly Thunderbird was good 20 years ago. And even then...
Makeshift solutions with pieces duck-taped together and inconsistent UX are not going to win any friends
It seems like people agree that EU alternatives are nice and that open source software is great... but even in software development the people making the choices still opt for databases like Oracle or SQL Server and the large US-centric cloud providers, or even communication apps like Teams/Slack instead of just self-hosting Mattermost/Zulip/whatever.
I don't think anyone is taking this seriously enough.
No one listens to the technical people that espouse the alternatives, partially due to the mainly-impenetrable language difference: business vs technical.
Management would rather depend on "Microsoft" than "that employee that talks a lot without saying anything useful / understandable". That's a huge bridge to cross. Even under the mad king, I think most Management would prefer to remain dependent on Microsoft and go out of their way to avoid the ire of the The Kingdom of Trumpistan than to migrate their "everything computer" to a lesser known, lesser proven entity.
some do some don't.
obviously most IT/software/tech businesses - especially weighted by capital, impact, influence, pedigree, and other factors of visibility and sales pushiness - are US based, so there's no point in caring too much about picking non-US vendors.
and many European businesses are targeting the US market, so again not much they can do to escape the influence of Uncle Trump.
Nothing has destroyed American goodwill than imposition of extra-territorial sanctions.
Btw when the US imposed sanctions on Hong Kong leader ,she had to collect her salary in cash as no bank would process it.
Why are the good guys sanctioning ICC judges?
Are we the baddies?
The relationship between the US and the ICC has been deteriorating for 3-4 decades now. The OIC effectively controls the ICC (they have the majority vote in electing judges), and the US fights terrorism.
This used to be a huge complaint across African countries (because they had the same problem: African governments went pretty far in suppressing islamic insurgencies that threatened their existence. Of course the insurgencies committed 100x the human rights violations that those states did, but never got convicted)
They're not the good guys. They're covering for the genocide.
There have never been any good guys, just competing powers and worse guys.
Because international institutions have an anti-Israel bias. E.g. in 2020 Israel was condemned by the UN 17 times while all the other countries put together only got 6 condemnations. [1]
In 2020, Israel killed 33 Palestinians. Compare that to Americans killing 19444 Afganis, drug lords killing 34512 Mexicans, Saudis killing 19056 Yemenis, Boko Haram killing 7300 Africans, etc. [2]
[1]: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/12/24/un-condemns-israel...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_armed_conflicts_in_202...
We are in such an insane bind here...
We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed.
Falling behind on AI and not wanting to be dependent on tools from outside the EU will put us at a significant disadvantage in research and production of new technologies and we're already far behind in that aspect.
We also don't want to drop our values just to keep up. Which is partially because we're still in the luxury position of being very rich. I wonder, though, whether we can keep this going in the current state of the world. Things seem to have changed massively in our disadvantage over the past 5 or so years.
It's not yet clear whether AI is so effective at actual work that it justifies throwing away privacy and even copyright law. But there do seem to still be open models if you think you need one.
Regulation is a complete red herring.
The reason the EU cannot compete in tech, is because its market is way too tight with the US market. Any founder has a choice (if you can raise this insane level of seed capital you have the choice). They could pick US, Canada, UK, France, Germany ...etc. Given that choice, they will pick the US every single time. It's strategically the best choice, simple because of its size and wealth.
It's not just regulation but a lack of cheap energy too.
Europe chose degrowth instead of abundance, now it reaps the whirlwind.
> We can see China and the US developing AI tooling (and other tech) at a high speed. One of the reasons for this is the lack of regulation and even active deregulation. In the EU, we won't be able to keep up with this speed because we tend to want to regulate first and many of our regulations hinder gathering the insane amounts of data needed.
Oh, but the EU didn't just "tend to want to". They already did regulate AI in the most onerous possible way for AI users and producers. They even pride themselves on regulating before everyone else and before even knowing what they are regulating: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20230601STO...
The article is about email. Europe could probably bring email "in-house". Large players like IONOS and OVH might help do it at scale.
But what about AI? Soon all of our email will be pre-handled by our OpenAI assistant while we will be driven around by Waymo and a good part of our work is done by a Tesla humanoid robot. How can Europe catch up and do that in a sovereign way?
For world-class AI, a country needs:
1 Photolithography
2 Wafers
3 GPUs
4 Software (SOTA Neural Networks)
5 Energy
Photolithography is in the hands of Europe already, and that makes no difference. All that really matters at the moment is the software and where 'the cloud' resides.
We already have AI in-house. Mistral is based in France, and their Le Chat platform hosted exclusively in the EU.
When it comes to chip manufacturing, no single country has it all in-house. Neither US, nor Taiwan, nor China can make state of the art chips without machines, materials, chemicals and support from a bunch of other countries.
For personal assistant AI it seems to me that improvements in efficiency will make this a non-issue. We’re able to squeeze more and more out of smaller language models. Eventually the models that require 100s of GBs in GPUs and giant datacenters will not be able to provide enough additional capabilities to justify their cost. Most tasks will run on-device with 10s of GBs.
Don’t know if there’s hope of state of the art CPUs, GPUs and/or NPUs being designed and manufactured in Europe. It has a lot of the expertise. Imagination Technologies and ARM designs GPUs in Europe. But the scale is lacking
I'd appreciate a legal perspective on this - is the problem that Microsoft's EU operations are run by a corporate division rather than a standalone subsidiary?
If it were an EU-based subsidiary that controlled the data about EU citizens, it would not be beholden to US executive orders, while still otherwise offering MS the ability to control global corporate strategy from its US HQ, right?
EDIT: fixed s/division/subsidiary/ in the second paragraph
The problem is that at some point you're always going to be subject to at least one country's laws, and at some point those laws will conflict with those of another country, even within the EU.
Going on-prem is probably the safest, but you're still at risk of physical search and seizure as well as being subject to pressure placed on your ISP to cut you off if someone really wants it done.
I wish they weren't sued into providing a backdoor for the German government, I vastly prefer their corporate structure to proton, but I cant really trust to use a "encrypted" service with a government backdoor.
The EU needs to take over Firefox, improve and support it, declaring independence
Digital sovereignty is not someone else's services using someone else's software on someone else's machines on someone else's networks. Its services you run, using software you control, on machines you bought, connected to networks you manage.
So reject the cloud and self-host!
So there's numerous layers to this:
1. Where and how is the data stored and retrieved? This can be made local by forcing all data users/services to use an EU data storage service that is locally owned and operated and under EU jurisdiction. Access to the data would only be to the service delivery operator and the appropriate EU legal authorities.
2. Where and how is the data accessed? The data needs to be accessed by the service provider (eg an email service) to handle incoming updates and requests. The access could be limited to the required updates and inquiries, or otherwise logged so that the service provider is held accountable for access.
3. Where and how is the service accessible to legal authorities? For example, police warrants for an email inbox. The service provider should be required to identify and reveal publicly what data is available and how it is legally accessible if required. Given encryption, it may be that the service provider is unable to provide that access to anyone except the end user (eg Protonmail, Signal).
4. What control does the end user have over their data and the associated meta-data maintained by the service provider? GDPR covers a lot of ground here, including the right to be forgotten.
Unfortunately the time to think about digital sovereignty was back in the 1970s.
We've stacked on so many layers of abstraction to computing and every step of the way Europe missed the boat due to its underlying structural issues for investment and fragmented cultures/markets. It's quite frankly too late.
Here's a NYT article from 34 years ago with the exact same story as today: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/04/22/business/europe-stumbles-...
Europe missed the PC, the internet, the smartphone, and is currently burying its head in the sand over AI.
Dumping a bunch of money into building an inferior domestic version of Microsoft 365 just as it's about to be disrupted by AI-native paradigms would be the amusing cherry on top.
It'd be like Apple moving the final cardboard packaging step to US factories and claiming their entire supply chain is 'sovereign.' Sure, China can't affect that last packaging step. But every layer of (far more important) abstraction below it they still have power over.
Microsoft did not block the email account of the ICC! This really is misinformation. See here: https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-servic...
The ICC has nothing to do with Europe and the EU apart from being located in the Netherlands, unless there is a claim that it is not independent and partial (hum hum).
The claim that it is "central to Europe’s commitment to human rights" to fluff their case is FUD basically to promote their products.
Wake me up when governments actually start writing checks. I bet the ICC will stay on Microsoft because doing anything else would be difficult. All anyone in big org IT knows is Microsoft, and no one wants to change.