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Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why by 01-_-

Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why by 01-_-

Europe needs digital sovereignty – and Microsoft has just proven why by 01-_-

19 Comments

  • Post Author
    BLKNSLVR
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:15 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    wickedsight
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:18 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    tormeh
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:24 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    mytailorisrich
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:34 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    nanna
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:41 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    bn-l
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:42 am

    Why are the good guys sanctioning ICC judges?

  • Post Author
    mg
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:45 am

    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
    

    Components 2-5 seem not on the horizon on a world-class level in Europe. So Europe probably won't have the means to do AI "in-house" in the coming decades, right?

  • Post Author
    Certhas
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:46 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    tallanvor
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 8:58 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    j0057
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:03 am

    "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…

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018

  • Post Author
    pembrook
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:27 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    falcor84
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:30 am

    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

  • Post Author
    rado
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:39 am

    The EU needs to take over Firefox, improve and support it, declaring independence

  • Post Author
    _vere
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:39 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    rswail
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:40 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    Havoc
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:46 am

    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

  • Post Author
    jansenmac
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:46 am

    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…

  • Post Author
    KronisLV
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 9:55 am

    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.

  • Post Author
    MaxPock
    Posted June 10, 2025 at 10:10 am

    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.

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