Look at how silicon valley was bootstrapped through government expenditure.
Just off the top of my head, accessing the IRS website (taxes) gets tracked by google. Windows keeps trying to pull everything online. Americans don't get separate apple app stores.
It goes on and on.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/microsoft-network-b...
There are EU member states where politicians lobby Congress and the Administration to put their rivals on the Magnitsky list. Europe is in no condition to resist the will of the United States.
And even this case it's pretty obvious that they are under attack.
If you run your own server, you might not know that you've been compromised.
The ICC is incredibly important, incredibly young and global. Shifting this to europe would not solve the problem.
If the ICC was able to have a contract with a fully sovereign supplier, that would be a whole new can of worms. It would be a matter of time (hours? days?) until a fully sovereign corporation put its profits above its negative impact on people.
More than that, how does an organization funded by a group of nations avoid the budget becoming politicized?
The issue is complex and the silver bullet is hard to find.
Well it’s incredibly young, but it is neither incredibly important seeing as how the premise of the court is suspect nor global seeing as how substantial portions of the globe have either not signed, not ratified, or withdrew their signature before ratification. I’ll give you “international”.
You’re right though: any possible software vendor is theoretically subject to someone’s sanctions regime. If they want to uphold the independence of their institution, that’s probably more work for an internal IT department.
What we've seen over the last 10 years in tech and politics is the rise of people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and they wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.
I've had so many conversations with crypto bros about how crypto doesn't really solve anything and NFTs are BS and DeFi is pushed by people who have no idea of why finance is the way it is or they're simply trying yet another rug pull. This is a fundamentally anti-intellectual position.
What we've seen since January 20 is the absolute dumbest, most ignorant sycophants destroy things they simply don't understand and don't want to understand. Destroy USAID (as one example)? Foreign aid is a tool of US soft power, a key part of US foreign policy. That's not money for nothing. We're buying influence. Don't even get me started on tariffs. Again, it's fundamentally anti-intellectual.
Part of me is glad to see how many people are waking up to the myth of meritocracy.
By taking punitive yet performative action against the ICC for hurting Israel's feelings by saying true things does nothing but weaken US tech influence over Europe. it tells Europe that the US cannot be relied upon and an alternative needs to be found.
Fun fact: the US has passed a law colloquially known as the Hage Invasion Act [1]. This not authorizes but requires the US to invade the Hague if the ICC ever detains and prosecutes any US service member or official or those of any ally.
By itself it doesn't really matter but it's death by a thousand paper cuts and there are a thousand other small things that are pushing Europe to distance itself from the US.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members%27_Pr...
It seems like a court, especially one dealing with international crimes where international esponage seems quite likely, should have in-house tech. It seems like being fully independent would be really important. Sort of in the same way i would expect e.g. the eu gov not to be dependent on a foreign cloud provider either (have no idea if they are or not)
They're also using Cloudflare for both DNS and a CDN.
Pragmatically though - yeah after Snowden US is not a good choice.
And people talked about Huawei…
gleenn•2h ago
palmotea•2h ago
Which political decision? The one to prosecute a US ally, or the one to sanction the ICC?
When someone decries something as "politics," there's often a problem where the analysis conveniently stops when the blame can be placed on the speaker's disfavored group.
gleenn•2h ago
mlinhares•2h ago
palmotea•2h ago
Claims about "helping the world" are highly subjective and often bullshit (see the often-mocked tech company talk about "making the world a better place [by doing awful stuff like shoving targeted ads in people's faces]".
> If the ICC is doing so much harm to the US, fight legally. That's where the battle should be fought. Not ripping away some guy's email access.
What do you mean? Sanctions are "fight[ing] legally," literally.
mananaysiempre•1h ago
repelsteeltje•1h ago
It seems you are making the point that using technology to punish subjective politics is the right way?!
Sidenote: ICC has been backed by many nations, occasionally including US too. Using sanctions in retributions to unfavourable opinions might seem against the spirit of US Constitution in other contexts...
Why not let arguments do their work in open debate? The ICC isn't a bunch of loonies or Saddam's Baath party. These are reasonable people, with dissident opinions, for sure. But reasonable.
> Sanctions are "fight[ing] legally," literally.
Technically, the more appropriate term might be "legalism", in the mechanistic sense.
SpicyLemonZest•55m ago
Well, that happened. Israel presented an argument that the investigation legally must end, as they haven't consented to ICC jurisdiction; the ICC openly considered and openly rejected this argument (https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-icc-p...), saying that Palestine's consent was sufficient because the alleged crimes took place in Palestinian territory.
The US has always taken an extremely aggressive stance that this theory of ICC jurisdiction is unacceptable. "It is a fundamental principle of international law that a treaty is binding upon its parties only and that it does not create obligations for nonparties without their consent to be bound", as 22 USC §7421 puts it. (If you're old enough, you may recognize this as part of the bipartisan "Hague Invasion Act" of 2002, widely understood as a threat of military force against anyone who tries to enforce ICC jurisdiction on a citizen of the US or its non-ICC allies.)
bawolff•34m ago
Its a little more complicated than that. The dispute is also about if palestine is a "state" and thus able to consent (and i'm not sure, but possibly what the territorial extent of Palestine is. it probably doesnt matter, but the fact that the official government of Palestine lost control of the gaza strip in a civil war a long time ago is another winkle in this whole thing)
While the court initially rejected Israel's challenge, the appeal court reverses the decision, and threw it back to the lower court, which is now deliberating on it https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/situation-state-palestine-appea... . As far as i understand most observers think this is an extreme long shot on the part of Israel and they are unlikely to win this challenge.
[IANAL, and far from an expert at this, this stuff is complicated, it is very possible i got the details wrong]
HappyPanacea•14m ago
HappyPanacea•22m ago
sunshowers•36m ago
qznc•2h ago
Kudos•36m ago
bee_rider•21m ago
qznc•3m ago
bawolff•26m ago
US isn't really a party to all this, so there isn't much they can do legally (to be clear i think americas sanctions are unacceptable). They could file a juridsictional challenge, which some countries did, but legally there isn't a huge amount of ground to stand on for that.
Other than that, the actual legal part doesn't start until (if) the suspects are apprehended. And if it does get to a trial, its going to be the accused lawyers who are going to be fighting it out.
username332211•17m ago
What's legally questionable, is for ICC to claim jurisdiction over Israel - a nation that never signed to or ratified the ICC statue.
Nekhrimah•10m ago
randunel•1h ago
You don't have to imagine it, it's happening. Is it happening to judges in your country, though?
DannyBee•46m ago
I understand in the pretend world they want to be able to do $x without ever worrying about being beholden to any other countries laws or politics or whatever else.
They want this for lots of values of $x, and often have fun asserting it will soon be possible.
In the real world however, this has never been possible, since the dawn of recorded history, for lots and lots and lots of values of $x.
Pretty much any time $x becomes valuable or interesting enough, it becomes impossible to have this happen in all and usually most cases.
It often doesn't matter how simple a thing $x is - sailing a ship for example, or buying produce, it usually only matters how valuable or interesting it was.
As long as enough countries exist, and they have laws that have extra-territorial effect, the likelihood this problem will be really solved trends towards zero.
What exactly does someone expect to happen here when it's just people and companies trying to follow the laws they think they are required to follow.
This is actually what should happen, and is happening
The usual response is then that some country or group of countries need to build some untouchable-by-other-countries infrastructure and that will solve having to deal with others politics. This seems to me naive at best. The only cases this will work is for things that can be 100% contained and controlled within a given country/group. That is roughly impossible for most interesting things.
For example - it makes no sense to have a economic-block-specific email provider to work around sanctions, because whoever wanted to sanction them will just ban transiting email to them, and then transiting packets, and then equipment, and then chips to make equipment, and then machines to make chips to make equipment, and then wafers used to make chips, and then raw resources used to make wafers, and then equipment to mine raw resources, and then ....
Let's assume you don't care about this group, but they are still powerful. Great - they'll do this not just directly, but indirectly, by forcing others who do have to care to do the same to you.
Now, it would be different if you are building this thing as a political move or strategy, rather than expecting it to solve your problem directly. But otherwise, it is remarkably rare to be able to work around the politics with technology, and if you do, you won't be able to for very long.
It's much more useful to focus on dealing with the politics, if you want to change it.
Wasting lots of time and energy and money trying to avoid politics seems like a bad plan